Chapter 6 A Coil Wound Too Tight #2
And that is the truth. But so is the fact that though he grew up impoverished, that former life is such a far cry from where he is now that it’s a reality he must not fully remember.
She thinks of Rudolph Valentino, who spent unwisely but also ended up on the losing end of contract disputes with his studios, disputes that rendered him unable to work.
Though he’d made a fortune, he died penniless.
Even his resting spot at the cemetery is a loan from a friend who took pity on him.
“What I worry about, Jack, is that when you have people looking out for you all the time, you don’t deal with repercussions. But what happens when they stop fixing things?”
Angrily, he takes a bottle of bourbon from beside the toaster and refills his glass.
“God, that one fucking choice. Leaving Donna like I did. And the irony, the real irony of it all, is that I just wanted my own life, I just wanted to start over, and now I’m handcuffed to her forever.
” He gives a small laugh. “On our wedding night, she told me she never loved me. That we’d have two separate rooms. And then she convinced me to go to war—widower’s payments dancing in her eyes, no doubt.
I was practically a child. I didn’t know.
Maybe if I could remind her that I wanted her, but she didn’t want me, maybe it would help.
I don’t know. But she skips town. She doesn’t want to be found. ”
Don’t blame us, Nico told Frankie when she first started working for him, when he explained how Jack and other stars were and would always be beholden.
We can only fix what’s already broken. And remember, we didn’t do the breaking.
While that’s true, and all the arguments about how this is actually good for Jack’s career are true, it’s more than this now.
It’s June. Because Nico’s right: This marriage is the only way she can have her baby.
But saying this to Jack, who already clashes with June, would only make things worse.
Carefully, she says, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but whether Donna loved you or not doesn’t matter. You still left a wife who made it very clear she needed you, and you left her high and dry after she waited faithfully for you to return from war. That’s how it would look.”
He doesn’t take well to the comment. “She’s not high and dry anymore, is she? And I doubt the faithful part. Hell, I should’ve stayed with her in Louisiana and done theatre. I’d be happier.”
Frankie tries to ignore the sting of this comment. “If you go against the studio, and they’re not there to protect you, you could lose acting too.”
Saying nothing, he goes through the kitchen and outside to the little table on the patio. But he leaves the door open as if hoping she’ll follow, which she does, rubbing her arms against the cold.
A coyote howls. One, and then another, and another. Cries that break into a furious yipping that takes over the night, filling the ravines and bouncing from the hills, until again their sounds go long and solid and haunting. A hunt. The excitement of the kill.
“I tried to fight for us,” he finally says.
“Don’t put this on me. It wasn’t us; it was your life you were fighting for. And that’s fine. I’d do the same thing.”
“No,” Jack says. “It wasn’t just my life I was fighting for.” Quietly, he turns to the trees, the sound. “They’ve left me no way to prove how much I want to be with you, have they?”
He downs the entire contents of his glass.
Where she grew up, someone slinging back booze like that was just the beginning; the end involved rent money spent in an evening and fathers on stoops outside of buildings, morning dawn on their faces as mothers scooted their children past. There’s a beat of regret on Jack’s face as he says, “Don’t watch if you don’t want to, but I’m having another one. And one after that.”
With that, she goes into the living room.
Thankfully, the coyotes seem to have stopped, and the silence is a relief.
She doesn’t want to leave him like this, so when he still doesn’t emerge from the kitchen, she sits in the chair by the giant arched window that overlooks the Arroyo.
The view is stunning, even at night, capturing the winding, lit-up beauty of the Colorado Street Bridge, a Beaux Arts arching expanse over the Arroyo seco, which runs with water every winter.
Here, at the window, was where they had their first kiss—after a long day of interviews, when the last reporter had left and the bridge was lit up, its globe lights like little moons.
For months there’d been chemistry—a stupid word, she’d always thought, to describe attraction, but with him, she understood because when they stood beside each other it felt like the air sparked, charged and reactive.
Each of them tended to look away, always finding an excuse to stand apart as if needing the space between them.
And they were never alone. Until they were.
It was late July, a day that held on to the heat, and when all the interviews were over, and O’Shea was escorting the last reporter down the long driveway, Jack needed help with a right cuff link.
Unwisely, he asked her, and foolishly she went to him.
The air grew hotter with every step, then hotter still, almost excruciating, as the space between them closed.
She felt his gaze on her face, even as she worked to unjam the clasp.
Her hand on his wrist. Their feet were almost touching.
She knew all she had to do was look up and he would kiss her.
And he did.
His hand in her hair, the cuff link caught for a moment as the front door closed loudly.
Nervous laughter, racing hearts. Logically, she knew that, before the studio set him up with June, he’d dated a new woman almost every other week, and that gave her comfort, because he wasn’t the type to want anything serious.
That, combined with the ruse of his relationship with June, meant this could go nowhere.
There was nothing to fear. But even as those rational thoughts aligned themselves within her mind, she felt it like a draft slipped under a door: This was different.
Seven months ago. A lifetime. She knew it would end, but never like this. When neither of them wants it to.
When he eventually emerges from the kitchen, he’s surprised to find her still here. In his hand is a full drink, the liquid an amber glimmer.
“Thought you’d left.” His words seem caught on a slide. Then he sees the bridge through the window. “Someone jumped last week.”
Suicide Bridge, people have started calling it. “Were you here?”
He watches the bridge steadily, as if it might try to get away. “Raining that night. A man, no coat, no umbrella. I knew.”
He’s drunk.
Without looking at her, he continues. “Guy climbed to the ledge and I’m screaming and O’Shea ran in, thought it was me, that I was hurt. Then he saw. Wasn’t a damn thing we could do. Not a damn thing. Man couldn’t hear us.”
“Even if he could—”
“What? I couldn’t help?” He’s looking at her now, a swirl of anger in his eyes. “What the hell good is any of this if I couldn’t help? Of course I could.”
You don’t grow up as she did, around men whose sweat stank of whiskey, and not know to be quiet in a situation like this.
Someone drunk, who’s let booze light the fire of their anger, you walk away.
You leave words unsaid. There is no pride, there is no being right at a moment like this; there is only saving yourself.
And she knows this, but she also knows that Jack struggles with the idea that all he is to people is a dollar sign.
She remembers when it rained last week, and how she didn’t hear from him at all that night, and the next day when they met in Venice Beach, he’d seemed still stuck within a storm, his eyes dark though the day blared with sun.
Now she knows why. “Jack. It’s not always about money. ”
He gives her a knowing look, his eyes red. “You break my heart.” Then he takes a deep, wobbly breath, lifts the glass to his lips, and slings back the rest. A wince, and he returns his gaze to the bridge. “It’s never about money until it is. And it always is. A quote I gave Milton.”
“What are you talking about?”
“For his script. I could’ve fixed things for that man. And his whole family.”
“Now you’re talking about the man on the bridge.”
He nods dramatically as if his head has grown heavy. She gets up and goes back to the kitchen, smelling the bite of bourbon on him as she passes. “I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” she says, grabbing her tote bag off the kitchen table. “And for me to go.”
“No, come on, Frankie,” he says, and somehow, in his mind, it must be that the bag is the deciding factor, because he tries to take it from her and pulls too hard. The cotton strap breaks, and the entire thing spills onto the built-in kitchen table and the floor below.
“Damn it, Jack!”
She’s got her coin purse and her keys on the table when they hear the noise. Outside the kitchen door and just beyond the patio. Coming from the alleyway where he keeps his trash.
The moment is like a coil wound too tight.
In a flash, it comes undone. He says the word reporters and is gone, then back with a shotgun.
She chases after him, yelling at him to stop, but already he’s outside, and from the way he’s got the gun hoisted against his shoulder, she knows he’s no longer seeing his yard, that his mind has caught in a crevasse of the past, and he’s banging open the gate and lifting the gun as Frankie catches up and sees the muzzle pointed at a woman going through his trash.
“Stop! Jack, stop! That’s a woman!”
He blinks. Once, twice, three times—clearing what’s before him.
The woman is frozen and pale from fear, and there’s a whimpering sound, but Frankie won’t look away from Jack until he lowers the shotgun—and then she sees the little boy who clings to his mother’s leg, maybe four years old.
On the ground is a piece of cardboard, on top of which are two browned bananas, a half-eaten slice of carrot cake, and a torn box of crackers.
Frankie turns toward Jack and hisses the word Go. He’s staring at the kid, then stumbling back through the gate, as Frankie faces the woman. “I’m sorry. We have food. I’ll bring you food. Stay. Please stay.”
The woman either doesn’t understand or is still too shocked to hear what Frankie’s saying, but Frankie motions to the food and indicates the house, and the child is still crying when Frankie runs back inside, into the kitchen, headlines flashing through her mind as she quickly takes her empty tote bag that still works but now doesn’t have a handle and puts as much food in it as possible.
Chicken legs still in a small glass Pyrex, fresh oranges, an unopened box of crackers and a tin of Ovaltine, and whatever else she can grab, she doesn’t even know, and as she runs back outside, she knows the woman will be gone, that the alley will be empty, and then she will have to work with Nico to head this off, and what are the odds that this woman didn’t recognize Jack, whose face is on multiple billboards throughout the city?
The gate is still unlocked, and she pauses before pushing it open, afraid to startle the woman if she’s still there, yet even more afraid to find her gone.
But the woman is there. Still at the trash can, eyes shining with tears.
It’s clear that though she is terrified, her son is hungry, and Frankie knows that a mother will face anything to feed her child.
Just then, somewhere not far enough away, the coyotes’ howling starts up again, and Frankie understands that the hunt never stopped, it simply went silent.
The woman, as well, turns to the sound, and her son draws closer to her legs.
Trying to ignore the noise, the chaos of this evening that she can’t seem to control, Frankie holds the bag from the bottom and indicates the broken strap.
But the woman just nods, tears now streaking, and hugs the bag in her arms carefully as if holding on to someone she’s afraid to lose.
When she turns to head back down the alley, her son is at her side, his small fist around the fabric of her skirt.