Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

Well, that second Sy opened the trailer door. He took one look at her and…you would not believe his face!”

“Tell me.”

“Beet red, and I mean b-e-e-t. She said something like

‘Hiya, Sy!’ as if she expected him to give her this major warm welcome, which, of course, he didn’t.” Gregory drew in his sunken cheeks. He seemed to be waiting for applause.

I didn’t clap. “Gregory, you came in to tell me about a threat.”

“Oh. Right. Yes, well, Sy gave her this withering look and said, ‘This is not a Bonnie Bernstein production. You know you do not come onto a set unless you are invited.’ And believe me, the way he said it was not exactly sotto voce. I mean, Sy could be beard.”

Shit. Even though I knew there was something wrong about Bonnie, I felt lousy for her. “How did she react?” I asked.

“Jolted. Absolutely jolted. I mean, for whatever reason, she had been expecting a red carpet. She must have thought he’d welcome her with open arms and—”

I cut him off. “The threat, Gregory.”

“Right. Well, she stood there for a minute, paralyzed. I mean, you can imagine the humiliation. For a second, I thought she might cry. But she didn’t. No. Quietly, and I mean quietly, like probably I was the only one close enough to hear, do you know what

MAGIC HOUR / 117

she said to him? She said, ‘Sy, you’ve just been a rotten bastard for the last time!’ That’s what she said. Days before he was murdered. And then she just turned her back on him—and walked away!”

C H A P T E R S I X

Jesus, what a day! Trying to dope out what was under Lindsay’s sheet of ice, behind Nicholas Monteleone’s cloud of congeniality. Feeling upset that my brother was so upset, wondering if he’d be able to find another job. Seeing Germy again, seeing my past. Lynne.

And Bonnie Spencer. The hardest part of the whole day.

Ever since the morning, I’d been fighting her off—the desirable, bare-armed fantasy Bonnie and the real Bonnie, big, plain. Okay, so with fantastic, gold-medal thighs. But I wanted her out of my mind, and she wasn’t cooperating.

After Gregory had gone—although not before he’d announced, in front of about ten guys in the squad room, that I was a “fascinating combination” of Scott Glenn and Keith Carradine—I lifted the phone to call Marty McCormack, at home. I wanted to fill him in, ask him if he thought I should bring Bonnie in for questioning, scare her a little. Actually, I just wanted to talk to a friend.

But all of a sudden, I’d started feeling…It’s hard to describe, but every drunk knows the sensa-118

MAGIC HOUR / 119

tion: a slight tightening in the throat, a fluttering of the heart, and then weariness, edginess. It all happens in that micro-second before your brain says, Hey, I really would love a drink. I hung up the phone and drove over to Westhampton Beach.

And at five o’clock, I was sitting on a brown metal folding chair in the basement of the Methodist church in the usual repulsive fog of cigarette smoke at an AA meeting. But I seemed to be doing everything I could to avoid making the old searching and fearless inventory of myself. Instead, I found myself easing into a real hot reverie—reliving my morning meeting with Bonnie, then improving on it. I was in her kitchen again, moving in on her. Her back was pressed against the sink, but now I was rubbing up against her. I kissed her, and she let out a cry of relief and desire and put her arms around me. Her arms felt so incredibly wonderful.

I became aware that I was breathing a little too deeply, crossing, uncrossing my legs. I forced my attention straight ahead.

The smoky basement haze softened the too-lip-sticked dark-red mouth of the speaker. Her name was Jennifer. She had wide maroon makeup stripes on her cheeks and dark-brown eye shadow that went up to her eyebrows. But although she looked hard, she didn’t sound it; she had that high, silly, sweet voice of a girl who asks you to make a muscle and then squeals “Oooh!” She couldn’t have been much older than Lynne.

“See, I used to empty out the saline solution for my contact lenses and put vodka in the bottles!” Jennifer explained. We all laughed, applauded; that was one we hadn’t heard.

“Anyhow, I kept three bottles in a drawer at work. Two or three times a day I’d start blinking like crazy and rubbing my eye.”

Usually I hated meetings in the summer. Somehow, 120 / SUSAN ISAACS

when I wasn’t looking (or was too drunk to notice), AA had become a nonalcoholic version of a singles bar. Dingy church basements were packed with yuppies exchanging degradation stories and slipping each other business cards. Despite all warnings, pickups were common. “Hi, babe. Need a spon-sor?” AA had turned into the new Hamptons scene, and locals like me felt like…well, locals. Jennifer giggled. “I’d grab a bottle of saline solution, toddle down to the bathroom and chug the vodka! And after work, I’d sneak the bottles into my purse, take them home and refill them for the next day!” This meeting wasn’t all that bad; along with most of the others, I nodded with recognition at Jennifer’s desperation and—despite her lack of anything resembling intelligence—her enormous ingenuity. I thought: We’re all so cunning when we’re desperate to fuck ourselves over.

I stretched out my legs and leaned back in the chair, forcing myself to relax, to listen, understand, learn. But just as I was thinking an enlightening thought—about how so many drunks have this almost religious belief in the superiority of vodka, its odorless innocence, its purity—Bonnie pushed her way into my head again.

Beneath that straight-shooter veneer, behind the savvy, self-effacing humor, what the hell was she? A Fatal Attraction psychopath pursuing Sy, hounding him to produce some hunk of