“Poor Freddie,” said Max, who wasn’t really focusing on the private battle between husband and wife. He had woken up this morning to the memory of Caroline’s words ringing in his ears: “You have to let that girl go.” “I’m afraid I was a bit of a shit to her last night. Where is she? I’d better go and build some bridges.”
He found her upstairs in the bathroom, vainly trying to insert a Little Mermaid toothbrush into Madeleine’s mouth while giving Bertie detailed instructions on shoelace tying.
“Uncle Max!” squealed Maddie when she saw him, spraying toothpaste foam all over Freddie’s sweater. She jumped up and launched herself into his arms.
“Hello, lovely.” He kissed her on the neck, making her giggle. “How clean are those teeth, then?” She withdrew the toothbrush from her mouth and grinned at him, proudly revealing a rather gappy row of milk teeth.
“Perfect. I’m finished,” she announced, wriggling free and running off down the corridor before Freddie had a chance to stop her.
“Bertie, mate, do you think you could do that in your own room?” Max asked his nephew. “I’d like to talk to Frederique on her own.”
“Sure,” said Bertie, beaming. He loved it when his uncle called him “mate.” It made him feel really grown up. Stamping down the backs of his shoes with his heels, he hobbled off after his sister.
Max perched on the edge of the bath next to Freddie and stared down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was being a jerk.”
“Yes, you were,” she agreed, to his surprise. But she allowed her hand to brush against his anyway, which Max took as a signal to put his arm around her.
“I didn’t mean what I said. I’d had too much to drink, I was upset, but that’s no excuse for taking it out on you. Do you forgive me?” He looked up at her and saw, with horror, that there were tears in her eyes. “Oh God, sweetheart, I’m really sorry,” he said, pulling her to him. “Please don’t cry.”
She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand and looked at him, concentrating on his face in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable. It was as if she could see right through him. For a twenty-year-old, thought Max, Freddie could be very old and wise sometimes.
When she finally broke the silence, he wished she hadn’t. “You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”
She didn’t drop her gaze. Max had no choice but to look right at her when he replied. “No. No I’m not,” he said. “This news, it just took me by surprise, that’s all. Knocked me for six.” He tried to sound reassuring.
“Do you love me, Max?”
Freddie wasn’t letting this one go. He knew how much it had cost her to ask the question, and he couldn’t bear to cause her any more pain. Putting his arms around her again so she couldn’t see his face when he spoke, he gave the only answer he could.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course I do.”
But they both knew he was lying.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
As it turned out, Max’s suspicions about Siena and Randall’s whirlwind engagement had not been entirely groundless.
After the disastrous AIDS benefit at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Siena had gone to bed and waited miserably for Randall to come home. By the time he did roll in, at almost five in the morning, smelling of liquor and women’s perfume and with his shirt buttoned up wrong, she was a nervous wreck.
“I suppose you’ve been with Miriam, have you?” she accused him tearfully. “I just hope for both our sakes she didn’t give you anything.”
Randall made no attempt to deny it. “I’d rather have been with you,” he said, stripping down to his boxer shorts and climbing into bed beside her. “But you made your feelings pretty clear at the hotel. You preferred to skulk back here and mope about your ex than come to the party with me.”
“That’s not true,” she protested, but she was too exhausted to go over it all again. “It’s you I’ve been thinking about all night, not Max. And I certainly didn’t ask you to go and fuck that cheap little slut. How could you, Randall?”
He turned to face her, propping himself up on his elbow.
Her eyes were puffy and red from crying, and her skin looked even paler than usual, washed out with exhaustion. Her new, shorter hair had relaxed from its earlier pinned and hair-sprayed solidity, and fell about her face in soft, tangled waves. She looked like a frightened six-year-old who’d just woken up from a nightmare. Except with very big boobs, which she was covering defensively now with both hands, presumably against him.
“Who said I fucked her?” he asked, still gazing at Siena’s beautiful naked body.
“You did.” She sounded confused, having been thrown a lifebelt of hope that perhaps, by some miracle, he had been faithful to her. “You said you’d rather have been with me. Which means that you must have been with her, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?” said Randall. He was being infuriatingly nonchalant about the whole thing.
“Oh, of course it does!” she cried, hitting him across the chest in frustration as she felt her glimmer of hope disappearing again.
“Well, would you actually care if I had?” he asked calmly, ignoring her near hysteria. “Fucked Miriam, I mean.”
“Would I care?” She stared at him incredulously. “Of course I’d care, Randall. Why do you think I’ve been lying awake all night, crying my goddamn eyes out? Of course I fucking care.”
At which point he had rolled on top of her and made love to her more tenderly than ever before.
For the next three hours, he had gently and expertly licked and teased and caressed her, bringing her to climax again and again and again, until they were both too tired to move. Afterward, as she was drifting off into a deeply contented, sexually replete sleep, he had asked her to marry him.
By the time Siena woke up, it was almost three in the afternoon, and Randall had gone. She leaped out of bed in a panic, terrified that last night’s events—the ones at the end, anyway—had been some sort of dream.
But there in the bathroom, propped up on her dresser, was a note from Randall. It said he had gone to the office and wouldn’t be back till late—but perhaps tomorrow, if he could get away in time, he would take her out for dinner to celebrate their engagement.
Siena read the note a few times, just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, and sank down onto the toilet seat, weak with relief. He was really going to marry her. It was going to be okay.
Relief was definitely the overwhelming emotion, not joy. She knew she didn’t love Randall, or at least she wasn’t in love with him with the same blind, trusting passion she’d felt for Max. But she now saw that as a good thing.
As Randall’s wife, she would be guaranteed a life of wealth, fame, and privilege. She no longer had to keep looking over her shoulder, waiting for everything she had, all her security to be snatched away on somebody else’s whim. Marriage to Randall meant a safety net and the only kind of security you could count on—financial.
Her relief that he was finally, and against all the odds, about to make a commitment to her was profound and intense. For the first time since Max had betrayed her, she felt she could breathe easy.
Randall, by contrast, had had a somewhat stressful awakening when he remembered his rash promise of the night before. He’d been so drunk, and so horny, his libido having already been awakened by a truly expert blow job from Miriam at Johnny’s party, that he’d gotten carried away.
Siena’s extreme vulnerability always turned him on anyway. It made him feel strong. But the real killer last night had been when she’d told him that she actually cared for him. Not for the money, for him.
Since he’d made his fortune, no woman had ever said that to him and meant it, as he was sure Siena did. That made her different, special.
But marriage? What the hell was he thinking?
Randall had already decided long ago that he would never share his life or his fortune with anyone. He didn’t want children, and he’d seen too many wealthy guys go bankrupt that way.<
br />
His first thought on getting out of bed was that he would have to get out of it as soon as possible. Just tell her he was joking, he was drunk, anything. But as he started to shave and dress, he gradually began to perceive the upside in the situation.
An engagement would be fabulous publicity for the movie, which he desperately needed. It might also calm Siena down, make her ease up on the histrionics both at home and on-set. Recently, she’d been wearing her insecurity on her sleeve to a degree that even Randall found alarming.
Then there was the other-women factor. Not that he ever had many problems attracting beautiful girls, but there was no doubt that being seen as off the market seemed only to encourage the most rapacious and best-looking gold diggers. Yes, on second thought, a very public engagement would have its advantages. It wasn’t like he had to go through with the wedding.
As it turned out, his predictions proved completely correct.
Not only did the leaking of the news, and the carefully choreographed denials of an engagement, generate massive worldwide interest in both them as a couple and the film, but Siena also visibly relaxed from the moment she got the ring—an enormous ruby that had cost more than his entire collection of Bentleys—on her finger.
Her one continuing concern was the question of setting a date, but so far he had been able to wriggle out of that fairly easily by insisting that neither of them would have time to focus on a wedding until after 1941 had wrapped.
One evening in early November, he had come home to find Siena looking unusually morose.
She was curled up on the sofa in the small sitting room next to the kitchen, watching reruns of I Dream of Jeannie and smoking. An overflowing ashtray and a large pile of discarded candy wrappers lay on the table beside her, and there was a bottle of wine, as yet unopened, at her feet.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked, picking up the remote and switching off the TV before removing the cigarette from her hand and stubbing it out. He hated her smoking.
“Hey.” She sounded annoyed. “I was watching that.”
She reached for another cigarette, like a naughty child willfully defying its parents, seeing how far they could be pushed. But Randall immediately snatched away the pack and began drawing back the closed curtains, allowing the early-evening sunlight to penetrate the smoky gloom.
“No smoking in this house, Siena.” He crushed the Marlboros in his fat hand and dropped the battered remnants in the trash. “You know that. What’s the matter with you tonight?” He sounded less than sympathetic. Randall found female mood swings supremely boring.
“If I tell you, do you promise you won’t get mad?”
“No,” he said, sitting himself down beside her. He hoped there hadn’t been yet another problem on-set.
“It’s Hunter,” said Siena, to his initial relief, although he noticed that her bottom lip was already starting to wobble ominously. “I called him.” Randall looked stony-faced. “I know you said I shouldn’t,” she went on nervously. “But it just seemed so weird that we haven’t spoken at all, you know, since it happened.”
“Since what happened?”
Siena frowned, surprised. “Since we got engaged, of course,” she said. “Honestly, darling. It’s a big thing, you know, agreeing to spend the rest of your life with someone. I wanted him to know.”
“Oh yeah. Right.” Randall got up and walked over to the bar. “Honey,” he said brusquely, sitting back down after making himself a large iced vodka. “You didn’t need to call him. He knows. The whole world knows, okay? Hunter may not be the sharpest tool in the box, but he can read, right? The engagement’s been all over the press from here to Timbuktu.”
“Ha, ha,” said Siena sarcastically. “Yes, he can read, and yes, I’m sure he’s heard about it. But he hasn’t heard it from me. We haven’t spoken.”
“So?” said Randall. He was getting tired of listening to Siena moaning on about a family who evidently didn’t give a shit about her. “That’s his problem, not yours. He’s the one who stormed off like a spoiled kid at the Dodgers game. Forget about him, baby. Move on.”
Siena wondered, not for the first time, if this was what Randall really felt. Couldn’t he see that they were the ones who had behaved badly at the Dodgers game, by setting Hunter up? That she was the one who owed him an apology, not the other way around?
“What did he say, anyway?” Randall asked in a tone that made it clear he had very little interest in Hunter’s opinions one way or the other. “He didn’t approve?”
“Nothing,” Siena mumbled miserably. “He wouldn’t take my call. I spoke to that stupid bitch Tiffany, and she told me to go to hell.”
For some reason, this seemed to make Randall irate. He stood up and began pacing like a tiger preparing for the kill. “He wouldn’t take your call? He, that two-bit little soap queen, wouldn’t take your call?”
Siena couldn’t quite see why this should incense him so much. As upset as she was, she was hardly surprised that Hunter didn’t want to speak to her after the way she’d treated him this past year. She’d been so desperate to hold on to Randall and her career, she’d dropped Hunter like a hot brick, for no better reason than Randall had told her to. She didn’t deserve his blessing, on her engagement or anything else in her life.
“Well, it did hurt me,” she began.
But Randall was still ranting, less concerned about Siena’s feelings than with whipping himself into a fury of indignation. “How dare he? I mean, who the fuck does he think he is?”
“Look, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” said Siena, who was starting to get concerned by the violence of his reaction.
“Of course you should mention it.” In an instant, he turned his displeasure on her. Sitting right in front of him, she made a far more satisfying target than the absent and untouchable Hunter. She shrank back, bewildered, as he glowered at her angrily, a feeling like Jack’s after he’d climbed the beanstalk and disturbed the sleeping giant.
“If you ever start keeping secrets from me, Siena, that’s it,” Randall snarled viciously. “From that moment on, it’s over between us. I’ll destroy you.”
“Randall, please.” She tried to calm him down. “There’s no need to get so upset. I’m not keeping secrets. You asked me what was wrong and I told you.”
The fear in her voice was like fuel on his flames.
“Oh, you told me, did you?” He slammed his drink down on the table and bent his face threateningly low over hers. “And what about what I told you? I expressly told you never to abase yourself by crawling back to Hunter, or any of the rest of your useless, fucked-up family. And what do you do? The second my back’s turned, you’re on that phone like a tragic little groupie. And he won’t even talk to you!”
Siena shuddered. She could smell Randall’s sour breath, pouring out of him like bile. He hadn’t flown off the handle at her like this in months, and she had no idea why her call to Hunter should have triggered such a catastrophic relapse.
“You’ve embarrassed me, and you’ve embarrassed yourself,” he announced, looking at her like something unpleasant he might be forced to disinfect.
“I’m sorry,” said Siena, by now desperate to appease him. “I was just so happy about us being engaged, and I haven’t had anyone to share it with.”
“What do you mean you haven’t had anyone to share it with?” Randall sounded incredulous. “The whole world’s been talking about it. Look!”
He picked up a copy of last week’s New York Times Magazine from the coffee table behind him, still opened to the picture of the two of them together at Cannes, and shoved it under Siena’s nose.
“I know,” she said, staring at the image. “But I meant . . .” She was walking on eggshells now, anxious to choose her words carefully and not provoke him any further. “I meant I had nobody to share the news with who I love, or who loves me. That’s all.”
“Everybody loves you, Siena,” said Randall, pointing to the picture again, more gen
tly this time, and kissing the top of her head, the storm of his anger apparently subsided. Whether he had willfully misunderstood her or not, she couldn’t tell. She was just relieved the shouting had stopped.
“Now, why don’t you go upstairs and get changed.” His tone was suddenly brisk and businesslike again. “I’m taking you to Morton’s tonight, remember, with Luke and Sabrina.”
Shit, she’d forgotten. Dinner with her director and his tedious sculptor wife was the last thing she felt like, especially now. Fights with Randall were so terrifying, they always left her utterly emotionally exhausted.
“And don’t forget to brush your teeth again, will you?” he added, downing the last of his vodka. “You know I can’t stand the smell of cigarettes on your breath.”
Dinner was every bit as gruesome as Siena had feared.
Luke was a sweetheart—the two of them had been getting along much better now that things had improved on-set—but his wife was terribly pretentious, one of those artistic types who go on about how much better the Norton Simon is than the Getty, and isn’t it a tragedy that they can’t move back to New York, where the people are so much more real?
Sabrina also mistakenly assumed that because Siena had made her name as a model, she must be stupid.
“I must say, the recent modern American sculpture exhibition at the Getty was a disgrace, wasn’t it, Luke? Did you see it, Randall?”
“No, I’m afraid not.” Randall smiled, trying to be polite. He couldn’t stomach Sabrina any more than Siena could. “I don’t have a lot of free time for museums.”
“Of course you don’t,” Sabrina agreed obsequiously before turning with a patronizing smirk to Siena. “I expect it’s not really your sort of thing either, is it, my dear?”
“No, it’s not,” said Siena rudely. Unlike Randall, she saw no point in being polite to the hairy-legged old frump, or engaging her in conversation a moment longer than necessary.
“I expect you’re more interested in fashion and things, aren’t you? With your modeling background?” Sabrina went on, ignoring the warning glances from her husband.