Elwood introduced her to June, but June did not come to the fence when she said it was nice to meet Melanie and that she hoped she would enjoy living in Malibu. She then told Elwood that his morning tea was ready if he wanted to come inside and have it.
“Have a nice day, Gwendolin,” Elwood said as he rose to step fully back inside his house.
She waved goodbye and he closed the door and was gone.
When Melanie went back inside the house, she added to her list of activities for the day:
Talked with Elwood Blankenship.
And crossed it off the list.
Carson came over that night and she told him about meeting Elwood and that, despite her being careful, he had figured out who she was but he also promised to keep her whereabouts a secret.
“It’ll be nice having a friend to talk to,” she said to him as they sat around the kitchen table eating the chicken and biscuits he’d brought for their dinner.
“But you can talk to me,” he said, frowning slightly.
“Sure, when you’re here. I’m talking about having someone to talk to when you’re not here, which is pretty much all the time. It gets lonely here, Carson. This place is like a crypt.”
“It’s…a really nice house, Mel.”
“Okay, it’s like a really nice crypt. I don’t like being aloneallthe time.”
“All right, all right.” He took a bite from a chicken leg.
“And why aren’t you hiding out like I am?” she asked, anobservation that had been needling her the last three days. “Why aren’t you out here with me if it’s so risky for us to be out and about?”
Carson wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Because I can maintain my distance from hecklers and the press and all that. My house is gated. I have my own vehicle. I can afford private security.”
“But you still get to be around other people. It’s not fair to expect me to speak to no one or to never go out to eat. I’m getting pretty tired of canned soup for dinner. You try eating it five nights in a row.”
A few days later he’d hired Eva for six days a week from nine to three, to cook and clean and no doubt keep her company. Having Eva in the house was certainly better than having no one, but it was Elwood she was drawn to for company.
Over the next few weeks, as July eased into August, Melanie would find herself talking often to Elwood either across the fence, as he sat in the patio doorway, or sometimes as he stood by an open upstairs window and she spoke to him from several feet below and on her side of the fence. Twice in September he welcomed her into his house for short visits, and they talked about plays and movies and acting. Both times June served them coffee and seemed to hover. Melanie thought it was perhaps because Elwood had so few visitors, only his agent and a few studio execs and couriers; Melanie was his only outside-the-studio friend. She hoped maybe June liked that Elwood was opening himself up to someone new from the outside.
She came to learn in the first of those two inside visits—and in general terms—of the car accident years earlier that had a lasting effect on Elwood and made him not want to leave his house.
“Because you’re afraid you might get into another accident?” she’d asked.
“Something like that.”
He’d stood then, signaling that the visit was over, and she intuited this was a topic he didn’t discuss. She would not bring it up again, though it bothered her that this good man was stuck inside his own house by choice. She wanted to be his friend. She wanted him to be hers.
When Carson broke the news to Melanie in October that a director friend had offered him a lead role in a new Broadway play and he would be leaving for New York for a spell, she went to Elwood to lament how jealous she was that Carson was going to be working again. He’d listened as she cried tears of frustration and had offered her his handkerchief, but it was the last time he let her inside the house.
Not long after this she noticed it had been a while since Elwood had stood at the open back door, his chair straddling the interior of his house and the rest of the world. When he spoke to her now, it was from the upstairs window or the occasional phone call. Always from within—fully within—his house.
She expressed concern to June about this, but her neighbor told her sometimes Elwood would drift into a melancholy state for a while and would eventually drift back out. She needed to let him be about it. He didn’t like people fussing over him or telling him how he should feel.
But weeks had now passed and he hadn’t drifted back out at all. If anything, he’d gone further in.
Melanie tucked her shopping bags into the trunk of June’s car and hurried to the driver’s side. She still needed to stop at the A&P before heading back to Malibu to get the last few things on her list. No one had recognized her at Henshey’s as she shopped and then paid for the Tinkertoys and books and farm animals she found forNicky, nor when she bought Elwood’s fountain pen or June’s lemon verbena bath salts or the charm bracelet she’d picked out for Eva.
She’d made good time in the department store, but she didn’t want June and Eva to have to be responsible for Nicky any longer than they had to be, nor did she want to tempt fate by staying out too long and having some random reporter figure out who she was and start pelting her with questions.
Besides, while it had been enjoyable at first, shopping in the open like any normal person, she knew the whole time it was all a façade. That joyous feeling of being out had begun to lessen as soon as she’d paid for her purchases and walked back out to the car. The shopping trip had been fun but it had changed nothing.
She was still grieving a lost career.
