Susan Johnson - Hot Streak

He moved back just out of reach in a casual way. “Swear to God, Sylvie. Even my mother is complaining of how dreary I've become. She compared me to my father the other day, and that's the ultimate in disparaging remarks about hermit types.” And yet, it was true. Since his days with Sylvie, Carey's life had altered drastically. He was working hard and doing some of the best filming of his career. He was riding better than ever, with total concentration, and it showed. He and Tarrytown had picked up firsts at Autueil and Liverpool and if the Hunt Cup race next week went well, he had a good chance at the triple crown in steeplechase. It had never been done before. Dickson-Smith had taken the Hunt Cup and Grand National in 1975, but came in second at Autueil. Which reminded him just how little time he had here with Egon before the race. “Now if you'll let me get my hands on Egon, I'll try to talk some sense into his beautiful addled head.”

E gon was lying on his bed, his eyes half shut, looking at nothing. Three TV screens opposite the bed were tuned to different stations. Carey walked over to the elaborate communications system, pressed some switches, and the screens went dead.

“Goddammit, turn those on. I'm watching Dallas.” Egon's eyes remained unfocused for a moment, and then closed.

Carey approached the bed and said, “I'll turn it on in a minute. Hi, Egon. You're on the nod again, Sylvie says. Need some help?”

Egon's head turned in slow motion and his eyes filled with tears. “I'm scared, Carey. They bombed my car. You know that. They bombed my car. Sylvie won't give me anything. I'm out and she won't get me any more. I need a hit, Carey, now.” His skin was cold, moist, bluish; the hand he held out to Carey trembled.

Carey squatted down near the bed so that their eyes were level. Egon's pupils were contracted to pinpoints. “Egon, now listen to me. You've had too much already. You look like hell, like some damn ascetic monk. Have you eaten this week?”

“I haven't been hungry.” Egon's eyes closed.

Carey shook him hard, and his eyes slowly opened. “Listen to me, Egon. I've got five days before I have to fly back. Now I'm willing to hold your hand and talk to you and feed you spaghetti alle vongole-”

“With fresh raspberries for dessert,” Egon whispered.

“With fresh raspberries, you brat,” Carey said, grinning. “But you've got to take hold. You hear? I've only five days.”

Egon's eyes twitched slightly in his effort to smile. “I love you, Carey.”

“I love you, too, but don't get any ideas,” he bantered. “Now, do you think you can stand if I lift you up?”

“Sure, Carey.” But he was dead weight, although he pathetically tried to steady himself, sweat dripping from his tortured body. His slender form shuddered. “I need a hit. I can't make it,” he whispered, hanging in Carey's arms.

Carey felt his heart contract at the infinitely fragile ownership Egon had on his own life. His muscles taut with the effort, Carey lifted Egon into his arms and carried him over to a chair by the window. He lowered him into it, setting Egon's hands carefully on the chair arms for support. “I've got some chemicals,” he quietly remarked, bending close so Egon could see his face. “Just to take off the edge, but you have to promise to eat.”

Egon's voice was a thready whisper. “I'll eat, Carey. I promise.”

“Sit up, don't fall,” Carey cautioned, his smile kind and accepting. “I'll get a glass of water for these pills.”

After a touching attempt to swallow a few mouthfuls of food to please Carey, the drugs began to ease Egon out of his stupor. It reminded Carey of Vietnam, carrying a grown man, but the bed was large and white and clean when he brought Egon back from the chair, and there was a servant there to help him dress Egon in dry clothes. No mud, no blood, no stench of death. Ten minutes later Egon was sleeping, this time peacefully.

Resting in a sprawl on the sofa, Carey ate a sandwich and sipped on a beer the cook had sent up. He knew it wouldn't be long before Egon was wide awake and agitated. And that stage would peak anywhere from thirty-six to seventy-two hours. So he relaxed while he could. The city below twinkled with lights. The sea, awash with pleasure craft marked by their running lights, stretched darkly to the horizon where a thin outline of mauve defined its limits. The night air lifted the sheer curtains in a lazy pattern, bringing currents of warm, scented air into the room. Nice was a paradise for the senses. But Carey's thoughts were melancholy; it was such a waste. He wondered how long it would be before Egon grew up-or worse, didn't grow up but died from the heroin.

Egon also reminded him of Molly, and he didn't know why. With Sylvie it was obvious-the same height, the same slender shape, the same blond hair. But with Egon it was more elusive; maybe it was Egon's vulnerability, his uncertainty. Molly had spent the whole summer they were together traumatized over whether she could get out of the marriage that had been so long in the planning. It could have worked out. She could have canceled the wedding; they could have left town and moved anywhere.

But, he reminded himself, taking a long draft of the fine German beer, what good did it do playing “what if?” ten years later? Those kind of opium dreams didn't happen in real life. Never. And the sigh he exhaled was for his youthful impotence against respectable plans by respectable people more than ten years ago. He never had been able to understand why someone couldn't just cancel a wedding. But Molly had been afraid of causing a breach between her parents and Bart's. “They'd be crushed,” she'd said.

“It's your life, not theirs. Don't be some damn sacrifice,” he'd retorted.

“I've known Bart since grade school.”

“Jesus Christ,” he'd said in disgust.

“Our dads play golf together.”

“Are we talking marriage here, or a golf foursome?”

“Everyone in town's been invited.”

“I don't care if everyone in the universe has been invited. All I want to know is do you love him?”

She opened her mouth to answer, then shut it again.

“That's what I thought. Why don't you cancel the wedding?”

“Why should I?” Molly retorted in a sudden rush of anger, annoyed that Carey could harangue her but offer no commitment himself.

“Because you don't love him,” he said. In hindsight he recognized he was a fool for not tossing his heart at her feet, but at twenty-two he hadn't realized what a mistake he was making. He supposed it was his fault he'd let her slip out of his life. But in the next heartbeat he changed his mind. Hell no, he thought. It was her fault. She married someone else. He didn't go out to California until after she married. Damned if the reminders of Molly didn't surface at the oddest times, and he couldn't ignore the intangible sense of loss that always accompanied them. What was she doing this warm April night, he wondered…

But then Egon whimpered in his sleep, and Carey's mind came back to Nice.

S o are you going?”

“Of course I'm going. Would I miss the gossip session of the decade?”

“Ten years. I can't believe it. Everyone's going. I called Liz yesterday and she said acceptances are almost ninety percent.”

“We had a great party class,” Molly said, her smile reminiscent of glorious high school memories.

“No kidding. Remember Bucky and Tess at the beach the day after graduation? They were quite entertaining…”

“Or Rod… or Billy? Lordy, what a fun day, but I'm getting too old to drink forty-eight hours straight anymore.”

“We're only twenty-eight, Molly. Don't say old. Just in our prime. Just absolutely in our prime.” Georgia was a best friend who'd stayed a best friend through marriages, divorces, children, and grouchy moods.

“Speak for yourself. I have my moments when my energy levels are zip.”

“You're working too hard.” Georgia's concern was evident as she gazed across the luncheon table. Molly was almost too thin at times, her eyes large in her fine-boned face. In a way, Georgia had always envied the classic bones and willowy body, especially considering her own predisposition to put on weight just looking at a piece of chocolate cake.

“Gotta make a living,” Molly replied with a quiet ferocity, her dark blue eyes flashing.

“Especially after Bart stole your last business,” Georgia retorted, censure heavy in her tone.

“Especially after that,” Molly agreed, brushing a wave of her heavy, honey-colored hair from her forehead. “Ours was not an amiable divorce. Or an amiable marriage. It was a damned enormous mistake, to be perfectly frank.”

“Aren't they all?” Georgia casually remarked, a cynic about the joys of matrimony. “How is the utterly charming ass?” she asked. “Still using that fraudulent white smile so effectively?”

“I don't see much of him, but presumably that smile is still making secretaries' hearts flutter.”

“Every man's dream,” Georgia commented, “the office harem.”

“That didn't bother me so much as the selfishness, the pure arrogance that his behavior was acceptable because he was a man. It came as a great shock and irritation to Bart when I asked for the divorce. He said, ‘Why would you want a divorce? You can't support yourself. You need me.' He really felt he was doing me a favor, and I should be satisfied regardless of his lifestyle.” It was strange, Molly thought, because she'd always secretly felt she'd been the one doing the favor marrying him. She'd never told him that, of course, and he had his own conception of their marriage.

“Chauvinism is alive and well as we march into the twenty-first century,” Georgia remarked dryly. “Give it another thousand years or so, and maybe we can dilute it with careful breeding. And then again,” she sardonically added, “maybe we can't. In the meantime, save me, dear God, from ambitious men. They always feel they can tell you what to do.”

“Amen to that. Bart always felt his career success somehow offset all his liabilities, like never coming home, putting work first, second, and third above his family, which somehow ranked just below his weekly haircut. For Bart a wife was only supposed to be pretty and agreeable, children quiet and agreeable, the house clean, meals miraculously on time regardless of his arrival… Don't ask me why I put up with it. You know as well as I because Larry wasn't a scrap better.”

“Au contraire, sweetie, I do not know the answer. Self-analysis is not my forte. I do know, however, that life is infinitely more fun since I replaced thirty-eight-year-old Larry with two nineteen-year-olds.”

“Lecher,” Molly said with a grin.

“Come in, the water's fine,” Georgia drawled.

“Carrie's too nosy for me to bring two nineteen-year-olds home.” It wasn't the real reason Molly wouldn't bring them home, but she could be blasй, too.

“How is Carrie?” Georgia probed in a kindly way. “Still stable as Mount Olympus? Any sudden missing Dad?”

“You know Bart's idea of fatherhood-Christmas, birthdays, and ask me later, I'm busy right now. He actually prided himself on never having changed a diaper. And he couldn't even remember Carrie's age, for God's sake. What's to miss? Actually, I think she's adjusted better than I. I'm struggling with a fledgling business and edgy as hell at times.”

“She's a darling.”

“I know.”

“Modest mother.”

Molly smiled. “She's smart, too, and as of yesterday has pierced ears. I could kill her.”

“Get with it, modern woman.”

“I'm trying, but she's only eight.”

“And so,” Georgia teased, “what are your views on makeup for eight-year-olds?”

“Don't get me on the subject.” Molly stabbed at a chunk of her chicken salad.

“Kids grow up faster today.”

“So I'm told. Call me old-fashioned.” She chewed thoughtfully, wondering if she was the last mother in America who disapproved of eye liner for eight-year-olds.

“Speaking of old-fashioned. Been getting anything lately?”

Molly choked a little, not because she was prudish, but because Georgia's blunt delivery still threw her. She should have been familiar with it by now. Georgia had been eight when she asked Molly one warm summer day as they sat in her tent under the maple tree in the backyard, “Do you know what fucking is?” Twenty years later, Georgia was still capable of asking startling questions between “Pass the butter” and “Do you think the Democratic Party has lost its credibility as a working man's party?” Molly swallowed before she answered, “Don't start, Georgia.” She smiled in a winsome way that made her look much younger than twenty-eight. “Not after my fiasco with Grant last weekend.”