The Exorcist

  “Oh, I love you!”

  Regan ran from the room.

  “Honey, wear the new dress!” Chris called out after her.

  “How would you like to be eleven again?” mused Sharon.

  “I dunno.”

  Reaching for her mail, Chris began sorting through scrawled adulation. “With the brain I’ve got now? All the memories?”

  “Sure.”

  “No deal.”

  “Think it over.”

  Chris dropped the letters and picked up a script with a covering letter from her agent, Edward Jarris, clipped neatly to the front of it. “Thought I told them no scripts for a while.”

  “You should read it,” said Sharon.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yes, I read it this morning.”

  “Pretty good?”

  “I think it’s great.”

  “And I get to play a nun who discovers she’s a lesbian, right?”

  “No, you get to play nothing.”

  “Shit, movies are better than ever! What in freak are you talking about, Sharon? What’s the grin for?”

  “They want you to direct,” Sharon exhaled coyly along with the smoke from her cigarette.

  “What?”

  “Read the letter.”

  “Oh, my God, Shar, you’re kidding!”

  Chris pounced on the letter, her eyes snapping up the words in hungry chunks: “… new script … a triptych … studio wants Sir Stephen Moore … accepting role provided—”

  “I direct his segment!”

  Chris flung up her arms, letting loose a hoarse, shrill cry of joy. Then with both her hands she cuddled the letter to her chest. “Oh, Steve, you angel, you remembered!” Filming in Africa, drunk and in camp chairs watching the vermilion and gold end of day. “Ah, the business is bunk! For the actor it’s crap, Steve!” “Oh, I like it.” “It’s crap! Don’t you know where it’s at in this business? Directing. Then you’ve done something, something that’s yours; I mean, something that lives!” “Well, then do it, love! Do it!” “Oh, I’ve tried, Steve. I’ve tried; they won’t buy it.” “Why not?” “Oh, come on, you know why: they don’t think I can cut it.” “Well, I think you can.”

  Warm smile. Warm remembrance. Dear Steve…

  “Mom, I can’t find the dress!” Regan called from the landing.

  “In the closet!” Chris answered.

  “I looked!”

  “I’ll be up in a second!” Chris called. She flipped through the pages of the script, and then stopped, looking wilted as she murmured, “I’ll bet it’s probably crap.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Chris! No! I really think it’s good!”

  “Oh, you thought Psycho needed a laugh track.”

  “Mommy?”

  “I’m coming!”

  “Got a date, Shar?”

  “Yes.”

  Chris motioned at the mail. “You go on, then. We can catch all this stuff in the morning.”

  Sharon got up.

  “Oh, no, wait,” Chris amended. “No, I’m sorry, there’s a letter that’s got to go out tonight.”

  “Oh, okay.” Sharon reached for her dictation pad.

  A whine of impatience. “Moth-therrrr!”

  Chris exhaled a sigh, stood up and said, “Back in a minute,” but then hesitated, seeing Sharon checking the time on her watch. Chris said, “What?”

  “Gee, it’s time for me to meditate, Chris.”

  Chris eyed her narrowly with fond exasperation. In the last six months, she had watched her secretary metamorphose into a “seeker after serenity.” It had started in Los Angeles with self-hypnosis, which then yielded to Buddhistic chanting. During the last few weeks that Sharon was quartered in the room upstairs, the house had reeked of incense, and lifeless dronings of “Nam myoho renge kyo” (“See, you just keep on chanting that, Chris, just that, and you get your wish, you get everything you want…”) were heard at unlikely and untimely hours, usually when Chris was studying her lines. “You can turn on the TV,” Sharon generously told her employer on one of these occasions. “It’s fine. I can chant when there’s all kinds of noise.”

  Now it was Transcendental Meditation.

  “You really think that kind of stuff is going to do you any good, Shar?”

  “It gives me peace of mind,” responded Sharon.

  “Right,” Chris commented tonelessly, and then turned and started away with a murmured “Nam myoho renge kyo.”

  “Keep it up about fifteen or twenty minutes,” Sharon called to her. “Maybe for you it would work.”

  Chris halted and considered a measured response. Then gave it up. She went upstairs to Regan’s bedroom, moving immediately to the closet. Regan was standing in the middle of the room staring up at the ceiling.

  “So what’s doin’?” Chris asked Regan as she hunted in a closet for the dress. It was a pale-blue cotton. She’d bought it the week before, and remembered hanging it in this closet.

  “Funny noises,” said Regan.

  “Yeah, I know. We’ve got friends.”

  Regan looked at her. “Huh?”

  “Squirrels, honey; squirrels in the attic.” Her daughter was squeamish and terrified of rats. Even mice upset her.

  The hunt for the dress proved fruitless.

  “See, Mom, it’s not there.”

  “Yes, I see. Maybe Willie picked it up with the cleaning.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Yeah, well, put on the navy. It’s pretty.”

  After a matinee screening of Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie at an art-house cinema in Georgetown, they drove across the river on the Key Bridge to the Hot Shoppe in Rosslyn, Virginia, where Chris ate a salad while Regan had soup, two sourdough rolls, fried chicken, a strawberry shake, and blueberry pie topped with chocolate ice cream. Where does she put it, Chris wondered. In her wrists? The child was slender as a fleeting hope.

  Chris lit a cigarette over her coffee and looked through the window on her right at the spires of Georgetown University before lowering a pensive and moody gaze to the Potomac’s deceptively placid surface, which offered no hint of the perilously swift and powerful currents that surged underneath it. Chris shifted her weight a little. In the soft, smoothing light of evening, the river, with its seeming dead calm and stillness, suddenly struck her as something that was planning.

  And waiting.

  “I enjoyed my dinner, Mom.”

  Chris turned to Regan’s happy smile, and, as so often had happened before, caught a quick, gasping breath as once again she experienced that tugging, unsummoned little ache that she sometimes felt on suddenly seeing Howard’s image in her face. It was the angle of the light, she often thought. She dropped her glance to Regan’s plate.

  “Going to leave that pie?”

  Regan lowered her eyes. “Mom, I ate some candy before.”

  Chris stubbed out her cigarette and smiled.

  “Come on, Rags, let’s go home.”

  They were back before seven. Willie and Karl had already returned. Regan made a dash for the basement playroom, eager to finish the sculpture for her mother. Chris headed for the kitchen to pick up the script. She found Willie brewing coffee; coarse; open pot. She looked irritable and sullen.

  “Hi, Willie, how’d it go? Have a real nice time?”

  “Do not ask.” Willie added an eggshell and a pinch of salt to the bubbling contents of the pot. They had gone to a movie, Willie explained. She had wanted to see the Beatles, but Karl had insisted on an art-house film about Mozart. “Terrible,” she simmered as she lowered the flame. “That dumbhead!”

  “Sorry ’bout that.” Chris tucked the script underneath her arm. “Oh, Willie, have you seen that dress that I got for Rags last week? The blue cotton?”

  “Yes, I see it in her closet this morning.”

  “Where’d you put it?”

  “It is there.”

  “You didn’t maybe pick it up by mistake with the cleaning?”

  “It is
there.”

  “With the cleaning?”

  “In the closet.”

  “No, it isn’t. I looked.”

  About to speak, Willie tightened her lips and scowled. Karl had walked in.

  “Good evening, Madam.”

  He went to the sink for a glass of water.

  “Did you set those traps?” asked Chris.

  “No rats.”

  “Did you set them?”

  “I set them, of course, but the attic is clean.”

  “Tell me, how was the movie, Karl?”

  “Exciting,” he said. His tone of voice, like his face, was a resolute blank.

  Humming a song made famous by the Beatles, Chris started to leave the kitchen, but then abruptly turned around.

  Just one more shot!

  “Did you have any trouble getting the traps, Karl?”

  His back to her, Karl said, “No, Madam. No trouble.”

  “At six in the morning?”

  “All-night market.”

  Chris softly slapped a hand against her forehead, stared at Karl’s back for a moment, and then turned to leave the kitchen, softly muttering, “Shit!”

  After a long and luxurious bath, Chris went to the closet in her bedroom for her robe, and discovered Regan’s missing dress. It lay crumpled in a heap on the floor of the closet.

  Chris picked it up. The purchase tags were still on it.

  What’s it doing in here?

  Chris tried to think back, then remembered that the day she had purchased the dress she had also bought two or three items for herself.

  Must’ve put ’em all together, she decided.

  Chris carried the dress into Regan’s bedroom, put it on a hanger and slipped it onto the clothes rack in Regan’s closet. Hands on her hips, Chris appraised Regan’s wardrobe. Nice. Nice clothes. Yeah, Rags, look here, not over there at the daddy who never writes or calls.

  As she turned from the closet, Chris stubbed her toe against the base of a bureau. Oh, Jesus, that smarts! Lifting her foot and massaging her toe, Chris noticed that the bureau was out of position by about three feet.

  No wonder I bumped it. Willie must have vacuumed.

  She went down to the study with the script from her agent.

  Unlike the massive living room with its large bay windows and view of Key Bridge arching over the Potomac to Virginia’s shore, the study had a feeling of whispered density; of secrets between rich uncles: a raised brick fireplace, cherrywood paneling and crisscrossed beams of a sturdy wood that looked as if hewn from some ancient drawbridge. The room’s few hints of a time that was present were a modern-looking bar with suede and chrome chairs set around it, and some color-splashed Marimekko pillows on a downy sofa where Chris settled down and stretched out with the script from her agent. Stuck between the pages was his letter. She slipped it out now and read it again. Faith, Hope and Charity: a film with three distinct segments, each one with a different cast and director. Hers would be “Hope.” She liked the title. Maybe dull, she thought; but refined. They’ll probably change it to something like “Rock Around the Virtues.”

  The doorbell chimed. Burke Dennings. A lonely man, he dropped by often. Chris smiled ruefully, shaking her head, as she heard him rasp an obscenity at Karl, whom he seemed to detest and continually baited.

  “Yes, hullo, where’s a drink!” he demanded crossly, entering the room and moving to the bar with his glance averted and his hands in the pockets of his wrinkled raincoat.

  He sat on a barstool looking irritable, shifty-eyed and vaguely disappointed.

  “On the prowl again?” Chris asked.

  “What the hell do you mean?” Dennings sniffed.

  “You’ve got that look.” She had seen it before when they’d worked on a picture together in Lausanne. On their first night there, at a staid hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, Chris had difficulty sleeping. At a little after 5 A.M., she flounced out of bed and decided to dress and go down to the lobby in search of either coffee or some company. Waiting for an elevator out in the hall, she glanced through a window and saw the director walking stiffly along the lakeside, hands deep in the pockets of his coat against the glacial February cold. By the time she reached the lobby, he was entering the hotel. “Not a hooker in sight!” he snapped bitterly as he hurriedly walked past Chris without even a glance, and then entered an elevator that whooshed him up to his floor and to his room and to bed. When Chris had teasingly mentioned the incident later, the director had grown furious and accused her of promulgating “gross hallucinations” that people were “likely to believe just because you’re a star!” He had also referred to her as “simply raving mad,” but then pointed out soothingly, in an effort to assuage her feelings, that “perhaps” she had seen someone after all, and had simply mistaken him for Dennings. “Not out of the question,” he’d offhandedly conceded; “my great-great-grandmother happens to have been Swiss.”

  Chris moved behind the bar and reminded him of the incident.

  “Yeah, that look, Burke. How many gin and tonics have you had already?”

  “Oh, now, don’t be so silly!” snapped Dennings. “It so happens that I’ve spent the entire evening at a tea, a bloody faculty tea!”

  Chris folded her arms and leaned them on the bar. “You were where?” she said skeptically.

  “Oh, yes, go ahead; smirk!”

  “You got smashed at a tea with some Jesuits?”

  “No, the Jesuits were sober.”

  “They don’t drink?”

  “Are you out of your mind? They swilled! Never seen such capacities in all my life!”

  “Hey, come on, hold it down, Burke! Regan can hear you!”

  “Yes, Regan,” said Dennings, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Of course! Now where in Christ is my drink?”

  Slightly shaking her head in disapproval, Chris straightened up and reached for a bottle and a glass. “Want to tell me what on earth you were doing at a faculty tea?”

  “Bloody public relations; something you should be doing. I mean, my God, the way we’ve mucked up their grounds,” the director uttered piously. “Oh, yes, go ahead, laugh! Yes, that’s all that you’re good for, that and showing a bit of bum!”

  “I’m just standing here innocently smiling.”

  “Well, now someone had to make a good show.”

  Chris reached out a hand and lightly ran a finger along a scar above Dennings’s left eyelash, the result of a punishing blow by Chuck Darren, the muscular action-adventure star of Dennings’s previous film, delivered by the actor on the last day of filming. “It’s turning white,” Chris said caringly.

  Dennings’s eyebrows lowered into grimness. “I’ll see he never works again at any of the majors. I’ve already put out the word.”

  “Oh, come on, Burke. Just for that?”

  “The man’s a lunatic, darling! He’s damned well bloody mad and he’s dangerous! My God, he’s like an old dog who’s always peacefully napping in the sun and then one day out of nowhere he jumps up and viciously bites somebody’s leg!”

  “And of course his putting your lights out had nothing to do with you telling him in front of the cast and crew that his acting was ‘a cunting embarrassment somewhere near the level of Sumo wrestling’?”

  “Darling, that’s crude,” Dennings piously rebuked her while accepting a glass of gin and tonic from her hands. “My dear, it’s all very well for me to say ‘cunting,’ but not for America’s sweetheart. But now tell me, how are you, my little dancing and singing mini-nova?”

  Chris answered with a shrug and a despondent look as she leaned over and rested her weight on folded arms atop the bar.

  “Come on, tell me, my baby, are you glum?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Tell your uncle.”

  “Shit, I think I’ll have a drink.” Chris abruptly straightened up and reached out for a vodka bottle and a glass.

  “Oh, yes, excellent! Splendid idea! Now, then, what is it, my precious? What’s wrong??
??

  “Ever think about dying?” Chris asked.

  Dennings furrowed his brow. “You said ‘dying’?”

  “Yeah, dying. Ever really really think about it, Burke? What it means? What it really means?”

  She poured vodka into the glass.

  Faintly edgy now, Dennings rasped, “No, love, I don’t! I don’t think about it, I just do it. Why on earth bring up dying, for heaven’s sakes!”

  Chris shrugged and plopped an ice cube into her glass. “I dunno. I was thinking about it this morning. Well, not thinking, exactly; I sort of dreamed it just as I was waking up and it gave me cold shivers, Burke, it hit me hard; what it means. I mean, the end, Burke, the really freaking end, just like I’d never even heard of dying before!” She looked aside and shook her head. “Oh man, did that spook me! I felt like I was falling off the freaking planet at a hundred and fifty million miles an hour.” Chris lifted the glass to her lips. “I think I’ll have this one neat,” she murmured. She took a sip.

  “Oh, well, rubbish,” Dennings sniffed. “Death’s a comfort.”

  Chris lowered the glass. “Not for me.”

  “Come, you live through the works you leave behind, or through your children.”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit! My children aren’t me!”

  “Yes, thank heaven. One’s entirely enough.”

  Chris leaned forward, her glass in her hand at waist level and her pixie face tight in a grimace of concern. “I mean, think about it, Burke! Not existing! Not existing forever and forever and—”

  “Oh, now stop that! Stop this driveling and think about flaunting your much-adored body-makeup-covered long legs at the faculty tea next week! Perhaps those priests can give you comfort!”

  Dennings banged down his glass on the bar. “Let’s another!”

  “You know, I didn’t know they drank?”

  “Well, you’re stupid,” the director said grumpily.

  Chris eyed him. Was he reaching his point of no return? Or had she in fact touched a hidden nerve?

  “Do they go to confession?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Priests.”

  “How would I know!” Dennings erupted.

  “Well, didn’t you once tell me that you’d studied to be a—”

  Dennings slammed his open hand down on the bar, cutting her off as he squalled, “Come on, where’s the bloody drink?”