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

have Gideon and his lover, two women friends, and a lot of pleasant acquaintances.

Summers are a little better; I kept a couple of friends from my Sy days—a film editor, a Wall Street Journal entertainment industry reporter—and they have houses around here. We have some good times. I do volunteer work with illiterate adults and for every environmental cause that comes down the pike. That’s how I met Gideon. He was representing a land rapist, and we started out screaming at each other because roseate terns have become an endangered species, but we wound up great friends. You want more? I make eighteen thousand dollars a year writing pap for catalogs and the local paper and industrial publications like Auto Glass News.

What else do you want to know? Sex? Until AIDS, I slept with any man who appealed to me. Now I read and watch two movies a night and run five miles a day. I had an abortion when I was married to Sy because he said he wasn’t ready to have children. I wanted to have a baby more than anything. From the time I was thirty-eight, when it dawned on me that I’d never get married again because no one would ever ask, I stopped using birth control. I was never able to con-MAGIC HOUR / 283

ceive; I found out my fallopian tubes were scarred closed from a dose of gonorrhea I’d gotten from my husband about six months after the abortion. Well, that’s it.” Bonnie clasped her hands on her knees. “I guess you expected something a little more upbeat.”

“A little.” I had to be professional. What was the alternative? Taking her in my arms, hugging her, whispering tender words of condolence? I asked: “We found two condom wrappers in a wastebasket in Sy’s guest room. If you couldn’t get pregnant—”

“AIDS, chlamydia, gonorrhea again. If I could have found a way of slipping a Trojan over his head before I kissed him, I would have, but it would have lacked a certain subtlety.”

“Tell me more about your life.”

“What’s there to tell? I had such a happy childhood. And then my screenplay became a movie and got wonderful reviews, and then Sy came along and married me. Sure, I knew there’d be bumps. Tragedy even, like losing my mom. But it didn’t occur to me that life wouldn’t basically be wonderful.

Well, it’s not. It isn’t terrible, but I never thought I would be so lonely.”

“But now you have to deal with something a little more serious than personal happiness,” I reminded her.

“I know.”

“Like the possibility of a murder conviction.” My voice was grim, deep and low, like a 45 record playing at 33. The small bedroom suddenly felt tight, airless, like a cell.

Bonnie seemed determined not to succumb to the gloom.

She flashed one of her great grins. “So worse comes to worse, I get convicted for murder. After twenty, thirty years in jail, think of the script I could write. None of those Blondes in Chains clichés for me. You know: the dyke matron, the ripped uniforms

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so breasts peekaboo out. No, I’ll write a socially significant screenplay and maybe get on Entertainment Tonight.”

“Tell me about the screenplay you were working on with Sy.”

“Oh, right. A Sea Change. It’s based on a real incident during World War II. A German submarine surfaced off the coast of Long Island, and a couple of saboteurs slipped in.

In my story, two women spot them down by the beach: a middle-class housewife and a bargirl who turns tricks on weekends. Anyway, it’s about their helping catch the Nazis, but also about the friendship that develops.”

“You sent it to Sy when you got finished with it?”

“I called him.”

“What happened?”

“Well, first I spoke to his secretary, asked that he call me back, which he did a couple of days later. Kind of wary, to tell you the truth: I guess he was nervous I might be asking for money. But when I told him what it was, he was nice: You sound fan tas tic. Send it Fed Ex. Can’t wait to read it.”

It wasn’t only that she didn’t wear makeup, or that she did have incredible calf muscles; Bonnie was simply like no other woman I’d ever met. She seemed to be incapable of womanly wiles in any form. I looked her straight in the eye and she made no defensive feminine gestures. Her hand didn’t fly up to touch her nose to check if it was oily, or up to her head to smooth down or fluff up her hair. She didn’t make cow eyes or wounded-doe eyes, spread her legs an intriguing inch, thrust out her pelvis. No, she just looked straight back at me. I thought: Maybe it came from growing up with all those older brothers and that elk-shooting father and that rangy, broad-shouldered mother. Maybe she’d even tried batting her eyelashes or giggling, and nobody noticed.

Maybe

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she’d acted wide-eyed and inept around all those Brownings and Remmingtons and Winchesters in the store, or gazed upon the engine of the family Buick and said, “Oooh, what’s all that?” and got a swift kick in the butt, real or symbolic.

She wasn’t feminine. She was female.

“You say Sy liked your screenplay?”

“Yup.”

I thought about what Easton had said about it. “Then why would he have told one of his people to find something nice to say about it, so he could get you off his back? And why would he have told Lindsay…” I tried to think of away to say Sy thought the script was a piece of crap without actually having to say it.

“I can’t say for sure. With Lindsay, I think it was natural he’d try and cover up any relationship with me.” Bonnie rotated her ankles, making circles with her feet. “I mean, Lindsay has perpetually twitching, supersensitive antennae that can pick up any other woman within a fifty-mile radius.

Sy was so careful; he did