The click of a bulb, pink eyelids turn black, crickets loud outside the window. Is she imagining his breathing, heavier, tortured by something he cannot say?
He really loved her.
“Hey,” comes his voice. “So, I’ve been debating if I should tell you this.”
Breath stiff in her throat. “Yeah?”
He sighs for a long moment. “What you said the other day. Or thought you remembered. I don’t want you to think she didn’t care about you. She would hate for you to think that.”
“Please just say it.”
“She was going to leave him. Your dad. She wanted to bring you with her. I don’t know if that’s something you knew already, but I thought you might not, so I thought I should say it.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry. If that’s weird.”
In the half-light of the moon sliding under the shade, she wonders at the human capacity for blindness, at her own weak will for the truth.
How could he possibly know that?
If. If he was trying to tell her that early night, with the photograph of her laughing in his apartment. Horrible, hideous, intrusive if, buzzing like a gnat.If, then.If Sebastian was right all along. If it all fit into place, the tabloid article, Orson’s embarrassment. The nude photographs. Do they have his gaze? Could she recognize it? If Orson slept with her mother, then what would that make her? Has she made a mistake, trusting an actor for all of these years?
This is the way it might have happened: her mother (drunk? borrow, here, the memory of red wine and raised voices) arriving at Orson’s apartment. He, bewildered, but easily flattered. Maybe they regretted it. But maybe it happened again and again. They would have buried it, tried to keep it from permeating her other life. Her father may never have known. Was it a fling? Or was it love?
Maybe someone else can ask.
Viola
Do you want to come visit?
If she could just hear him say:That never happened.She’d believe him, wouldn’t she? It would be enough. It would make it all bearable, anything the tabloids threw at them, she would be ready.
And if it did happen?
Well, it’s a risk she’s willing to take.
1994
Orson has never been a particularly good Catholic, but homesickness has him going to St. Robert Bellarmine with Susie on Sundays. They sit in the strangely modern building, which feels familiar and foreign to both of them, the neoclassical facade, the long white nave, the chandeliers strung from the ceiling like disco balls, all of it like a movie set, each angle hosting a different scene. But the lull of Father Patrick’s voice, even if Orson doesn’t believe in it anymore, is soothing. If not home, it’s at least a place he understands. Susie has it too, the homesickness, along with the guilt that she confesses constantly—to him as well as Father Patrick—of leaving her kids behind, of not raising them in the faith. Privately, but with little shame or remorse, he confesses his own sins: the girl in the green bra at the Century Lounge, the singer in that band at Café Largo. He can’t tell Susie about these; it’s become too strange to talk about that sort of thing anymore.
One afternoon, after church, she asks if he wants to go for a drive. “A joyride,” she calls it, but lately she’s seemed more desperate than joyful. They crawl down the freeway toward Pasadena, Susan talking fast, excitable, almost manic.
“I told Sebastian I was investigating a heist,” she said. “He liked that. Turn left up here.”
“He must think you’re incredible.”
“Why is it so easy to lie to them?”
“It’s not a lie, it’s a game. You’re giving them a story they can digest.”
“They’re both so obsessive,” she says. “Viola will just keep asking you something until she gets the answer she wants. Is it dinner, is it dinner, is it dinner?”
“Sounds like you’ve had some early dinners.”
“It’s worse when I call and she asks if I’m coming home tonight. Right, go right.”
“They’ll grow out of it,” Orson says, though he has no experience in this. “It’s the age.”
