“The Nicole Nelson doll is being produced at just the right time. And in addition, there’s going to be a novelization of the series, to the point where it left off. It’s going to be … why isn’t this on my VDT, where it ought to be? … going to be monologues by all the primary characters. The book is going to be called Barren, and under that title it says ‘Passionate Intensity,’ and below that on the dummy there’s you, on a television screen — a CU slightly in profile. Your hair is windswept and you look great.
“Now: the man who’s doing this novelization seems to be a very serious fellow. He wants to talk to everybody in the cast, so I’m sure you’ll be obliging. The guy’s got credentials that would sound good played on a kazoo. He’s written another novelization, I mean a novel, that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, and he wrote a book on Vietnam — scratch that: he wrote something on Venus de Milo, an article or whatever it was — you tell me why my secretary can’t make simple, comprehensible entries on this disc. It looks like I’ve called up a fucking dream journal instead of a bio.
“I’m having the guy call you. I understand that he wants to come up, down, wherever the hell Vermont is, to interview you for a couple of days. Try to get back into the Passionate Intensity mind-set before he gets there. And get Lucy to send me receipts when she bills the corporation. I can’t go into Llewellyn’s office and talk up a hundred dollar dead animal. He thinks everything’s rechanneled money for drugs. I said, ‘You don’t know what life is like in the country. Nicole’s got a dog, it’s her necessary protection, it guards her and we deduct the Alpo bills from her taxes, right? You don’t think that sometimes maybe the dog makes a mistake and kills a sheep, or whatever?’ Here’s the good part: I said, ‘Would I pull the wool over your eyes?’ You tell Lucy that the next time the dog kills something, there’s got to be a receipt.”
A snippet of music played; Dionne Warwick’s voice singing, “Don’t tell me what it’s all about …”
The next sound was Piggy Proctor’s lips, smacking the receiver.
Lucy was sunbathing on a chaise in the side yard. Edward, who was expected soon, was still waiting to hear whether he was required in New York to photograph the elevator. He was still at the Birches, collecting $800 a day plus expenses. Nicole clicked off the cassette player. She had been smiling all the time she was listening, and now she smiled more. “God, am I glad,” she said. “I thought in September I was going to have to sit still for school a whole day.”
“Congratulations,” Lucy said.
“Imagine Stephanie Sykes as the heroine of a novel.”
“What makes you think she’ll be a heroine?” Lucy said.
“Because she’s a main character.”
“All main characters aren’t heroines, you know.”
“I just mean that she’ll look good. Like, Juliet died and everything, but she came off looking good.”
“Shakespeare might have had an edge on the person who’s going to write the novelization.”
“What do you mean?” Nicole said. “You don’t think Stephanie Sykes is going to get trashed, do you?”
“Think about the series,” Lucy said. “Nobody is really a hero or a heroine; they’re all confused and pulled in different directions. Almost no decision they make can be right.”
“Yeah, but Lucy — don’t you feel sorry for me that I was treated cruelly as a child and I got into drugs and drinking and everything?”
“Well, if anything, the woman who saved you—”
“She didn’t save me just to save me. She wanted to make it look like her marriage was normal and she and her husband were a family, and since she was a doctor and she knew about my child abuse and everything, it was heroic to take me in.”
“But you just explained it: she did it for good and bad reasons.”
“Luuuucy — nobody does anything except for good and bad reasons.”
“You don’t think that people are ever just good or just evil?”
“In fairy tales and stuff. I don’t know about real people.”
“Nicole, maybe we aren’t understanding each other — you aren’t saying that people, when they do some one thing, are doing it for a bad as well as a good reason, are you?”
“I guess it depends on how you define bad. Most bad stuff isn’t so bad that it matters.”
St. Francis was on his chain, resting his chin on a basketball that Edward had left at the house the day before. It was a clear, windy day, and the airplane that Piggy said might happen to be passing by was overhead now, a small plane that flew across the yard and field.
“You mean,” Lucy said, trying to sound casual, “that people are both good and bad, and sometimes they’re bad and sometimes they’re good.”
“Who doesn’t believe that?” Nicole said. “Like I said, there are probably some monsters and some angels.”
“And for the rest of it, do you … you think people are duplicitous, or what?”
“What’s ‘duplicitous’?”
“Deceitful.”
“No. People just do stuff. They look out for themselves, and if that means they step on other people’s toes, that’s just the way it goes. You’ve got to expect that.”
“Who do you know who’s like that?” Lucy said.
“What do you think about Piggy? You think he’s my guardian angel? That he’s just there to look out for me?”
“No, of course not. But what has Piggy ever done to you that wasn’t what it seemed?”
“He was going to take Jane and me to Chinois for my birthday, for example. He made a big thing about it. So we had to go that night instead of doing what I wanted to do. He had the publicist carry on about my birthday for a week. Then he wrote a note to Barbara Gerrald and sent her six dozen roses and said he couldn’t see her because he had to ‘babysit.’ She sent me the note when he started going out with Sylvie Marlowe.”
“But he might really have had a change of heart, but he didn’t want to hurt you, and of course he never thought Barbara would show it to you. Or he might have been embarrassed by how fond he was of you, and saying that he was babysitting just sort of passed it off. You know?”
“You don’t get it,” Nicole said. “Piggy’s business.”
Another airplane passed overhead and disappeared temporarily in a patch of clouds. It emerged slowly, and for a second it seemed to be pulling the cloud behind it. Nicole laughed. “I’ll tell you what Barbara Gerrald did that was just great,” she said. “She told the carhop at Chow’s, when Piggy and his wife were in there, that the flowers were a birthday present and gave him ten bucks to put them on the dashboard. It’s not that original or anything, but when Piggy and his wife came out and saw the roses, he must have had a hard time explaining it.”
Lucy couldn’t think what to say. She felt in the position of standing up for morality, but she didn’t feel comfortable in the position of a conservative adult lecturing a child, either. She had to say something.
“Who’s Barbara Gerrald?” she said.
“She’s Penny Holden on Summer Nights.”
Lucy had learned not to persist. The more she questioned Nicole, the farther away she was led from any facts that would mean anything to her. People’s real names, their professional names, the movies and/or TV shows they appeared in meant nothing to Lucy, let alone who they were married to, having an affair with, or considering suicide because of. At first Nicole thought that Lucy was teasing her, when nothing she could say would define a person, but by now she had subsided into feeling a little sorry for Lucy because she was such an outsider. Nicole had liked Edward’s suggestion that they have marathon sessions in which Lucy would throw her arms around the droning TV and Nicole would teach her by immersing her in the experience like Helen Keller’s teacher.