Chapter 13 #2
She felt almost sedate, watching him. Not sedate, perhaps …
more like content. Goodness knew she had every reason to feel content with him, especially after this morning, after he’d finally opened his eyes and turned to her in the mess of the sheets and reached for her—but there was something so intimate about this small, private ceremony unfolding before her, in her guest room.
Small moments, small details: his top hat ready and waiting on the dresser.
His walking stick propped against the kingwood footboard of the bed.
The quilted satin smoking jacket, still on its hanger in the open portmanteau, that no doubt he’d wear later on tonight, after the film, after the parties, after they’d returned home.
There was a kind of satisfaction in witnessing the minutiae of his life, the everyday seconds that built and built to become the scaffolding of his world. Motions and thoughts, signatures of who he was, how he preferred to live, routines becoming habits, habits that stretched into a lifetime.
She was thinking about that now, Rita had to admit. His lifetime. Her lifetime, with him. She was, she was, there was no denying it.
But I don’t want to need him.
AT FIVE-THIRTY PRECISELY, the silver Winton limousine Cecil had sent for them rolled to a dignified halt at the curb of the theatre.
One of the studio assistants standing at attention nearby leapt to open the door.
Giuseppe climbed out first, smiling at the sudden bursts of light from the news photographers.
He turned his back to them to offer his hand to Rita, who accepted it as gracefully as she could while still keeping the layers of her gown over her ankles.
Then they were smiling together, strolling along a long runner of crimson that would show up as matte black in all the photographs, her left arm tucked in his, her right hand lifted, waving, but slow enough and low enough so that nothing in the printed images would turn out blurred near her face.
She watched the movie with an acute focus she’d never found before, not even when attending the premiers of her photoplays back in Italy.
She watched herself on the screen, scrutinizing every gesture, every look, every quirk of her lips, every arch of an eyebrow, and still she couldn’t tell if any of it was any good.
At the time, cushioned in the warm embrace of the City of Angels, Rita had felt confident in her role, secure in Cecil’s direction and her own instincts, but now …
She sat in the middle row of the seats, Giuseppe to her left, Cecil to her right.
Two places away from Charles. Whenever the audience reacted to a certain scene—laughing, sighing, gasping—she checked their faces, these men of hers, to see if Cecil was as pleased as everyone else, or Charles as absorbed. If Giuseppe was chuckling.
Only Cecil seemed as focused as she, his expression never betraying an inkling of emotion.
The only time she saw his face change was when the final title card appeared, an elegant, cursive The End, and the screen went blank and the house lights resumed, and he came to his feet amid the deafening applause, offering a brief bow to the audience.
Then he smiled.
“WHERE’S YOUR HEAVENLY sister?” Alvin demanded later that night at the cast party at the Astor Gallery in the Waldorf-Astoria.
“Back in England, visiting our parents.” Rita offered a nod to a trio of Lasky starlets staring at her from across the chamber with eyes that might have held envy, or admiration, or both; she couldn’t tell from this distance.
“And careful there,” she added, turning back to the cinematographer. “She’s a married lady, you know.”
He lifted his cocktail glass in salute. “Well, then, tell her from me when that doesn’t work out, I’m very available …”
They laughed and toasted each other, her Rob Roy slipping fragrant just over the rim of her glass, sprinkling her fingers.
It was a great party, a swell party to celebrate The Unafraid, filled with stars and starlets, with producers and directors and writers and wives, a few high-rolling finance types, mostly underemployed scions of wealthy families, scattered throughout.
(Someone has to front the cash, Charles had told her, when she’d asked about the pack of laughing, red-cheeked young men at the bar, drinking glass after glass.
It makes them feel important, and trust me, their wallets aren’t even dented.)
The room was long and lined with seven floor-to-ceiling windows on one side and even more French doors on the other side, tipped with gilded metal braces and elaborate plaster wreaths, murals above each of gods and men, the twelve months and four seasons depicted in pastels of blue and cream and gray and green.
The middle set of windows opened up like the French doors to a wide balcony overlooking Thirty-Fourth Street.
They were open now, so beneath the laughter and chatter and the music of the string quartet stationed in the main gallery, there came the constant low hubbub of automobiles hemming and hawing along, the iron clatter of horse’s hooves, men and women’s voices, all lifted skyward by a breezed scented of exhaust and spring and tarry macadam.
Every now and then a motorcar backfired, pow!
, like a gunshot ricocheting through the streets, but no one in the gallery flinched.
Giuseppe stood on that balcony, sipping his own Rob Roy while listening with a furrowed brow to one of the finance scions, she thought, a rusty-haired fellow who was talking with his hands (no drink in them, at least) in grand, sweeping gestures.
The fellow paused for a breath, and the count said something Rita couldn’t hear, but it set off the scion once more, his voice rising, his hands moving to sculpt the conversation as a conductor might an orchestra’s concerto, never still.
Rita watched Giuseppe. The hard set of his lips, the tension held in his shoulders.
He lowered his eyes as he brought the cocktail back up to his mouth, and she had the feeling that the conversation had turned for him, whatever the topic was.
That he could use rescuing. Even as she finished the thought, as she took that first step toward the balcony, another man walked by—staggered by, almost—coming up to the conductor scion and interrupting everything, talking and pointing back toward the band of others still at the bar.
The scion nodded, made some excuse to Giuseppe, and headed her way with his comrade.
Rita kept walking. The pair of them nearly bumped into her, but the conductor managed to juke left in time, with a hasty Pardon me, miss!, followed instantly by the widening of his eyes as he glanced at her face.
“Oh!” he said, stopping entirely. “Excuse me! Miss Jolivet! An honor! A real honor, I swear!”
“Thank you,” she replied, also stopping, since both men were mostly blocking her way.
“That was some moving picture, wasn’t it? You did some job!”
“Some job,” echoed the other man, with a very faint slurring of the first word, so it sounded like sshhom.
“Thank you,” she said again. “How kind of you.”
“It makes me glad just to be a part of it, you know? I mean, I’m not much, just the man behind the scenes, but I guess I played my part too, you know?”
“I do,” she said gravely. “None of it would have happened without you.”
“Aw,” he said, and actually blushed. His companion pawed at his arm. “Well, look, it was swell running into you—”
“Almost,” she corrected him, smiling.
The conductor barked a laugh. “Sure, almost! It’s been swell to meet you. I’m sure we’ll cross paths again soon.”
“No doubt.”
He winked at her—winked, whoever he was—and vanished back into the jaws of the party.
Rita glided out to the balcony, taking a deep breath of the tainted air. She smiled up at Giuseppe, touched a hand to his lapel as he bent down to brush his lips against her cheek.
She resisted the urge to close her eyes and rest that cheek against his tailcoat alongside her hand; all at once, her body buzzed with fatigue.
She hadn’t even known she was this tired until she was near him again, feeling his heat, imagining his arms around her.
The solid strength of him, easily taking her weight.
She imagined they were home already, in her bed.
She imagined them in Naples, or in that perfect Mediterranean paradise called Mentone, in the tiled and airy rooms of his ancestral palazzo, everything warm and perfect and golden.
Colored-glass chandeliers; an emerald ring on her hand; her place right beside him, hand in hand, arm in arm, the pair of them linked and permanent.
And bound, her mind whispered. Bound and caged.
Instead of all of that, any of that, Rita gathered her strength and eased away from him, straightening one of the peacock feathers along her bodice that had bent just enough to tickle her collarbone.
“What were you two talking about out here? He certainly seemed animated enough about it.”
“The war.”
“Oh, the war,” she sighed, and moved to lean against the stone railing of the balcony, almost sitting atop it. “Even here, even now?”
“Always, I think. Or—I hope not always. But yes, that’s the way it feels.
It’s like a toxin already consumed, already racing through our veins.
Inescapable, even tonight. The young man, a Mr. Belmont, I believe, is all for compulsory conscription in the Allied nations, so he says.
He’s convinced it will end the conflict sooner.
” Giuseppe paused, downed the last of his drink.
“I suspect he’s never fired a gun in his life, except perhaps to shoot clay birds. ”