“Just because she didn’t have you yet,” Beth said.
Even before she could press the button on the automatic garage-door opener, Vincent threw open the door of the house. As if someone had hit him with an electrical prod, the sleeping Ben sat upright and was out of the car before Beth could put the vehicle into park. Her throat closed when Ben covered the lawn in two steps and practically picked Vincent up with a hug so eloquent she didn’t need to hear the words they said, although they evidently had a bunch of words to say. Vincent shouted something to Ben, who nodded and pumped his fist in the air…. Beth began to struggle out of the car, carrying a stack of presents. By then, Ben had given Stella to Vincent, who was holding her in the goofy way single guys did and saying that it was a goddamn stroke of luck she looked like her mother. Ben was so lustrous with pride Beth thought he would glow in the dark.
Beth dumped her first load of gifts and went back for more.
Kerry came in from her lesson and started ragging on Vincent that Stella wasn’t made of china. Then she added, “Sam. Vincent. Are you crippled? Can you see Ma carrying stuff in from the car? Alone?”
But Vincent ignored Kerry and said, “Ma, remember when I came out here after the movie was screened? And you said, Vincent, I have to ask you something?”
“Yes,” Beth said cautiously.
“Well, Ma, I have to ask you. When was the last time you turned on the TV?” Vincent said.
“I don’t remember,” said Beth.
“Radio?”
“Umm, last Sunday?”
“Look at the answering machine, Ma,” Vincent told her.
Beth gasped. There were thirty messages. She had left just a few hours before. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What am I not in on?”
“Have you watched the news? Have you read a newspaper?”
“Come on!” Beth said. “No! I’ve been trying to plan a family event here …”
The door to the house slammed open. “Hey!” Pat called. “Where’s Martin Scorsese?”
“Pop’s worse than Mom! Kenny probably had to tell him,” said Kerry, running to hug her father’s neck.
“What?” Beth asked again.
Pat came into the room, his tie askew, his face shining with sweat and excitement.
“Ma,” Vincent said. “No Time to Wave Goodbye was nominated this morning for an Academy Award.”
“What do you mean?” Beth asked.
Ben said, “Beth! Did you hear what he said?”
“An Oscar, Ma! An Oscar for Best Documentary Film!” Vincent told her.
Beth sat down on the floor. “Is this a joke?”
Vincent sat down beside her. “I thought it was at first,” he confessed. “I asked to call them back. They said I could never guess how many people did that.”
“Honey, I don’t know what to say…. Vincent! Congratulations! I’m … floored.” Vincent patted the carpet beside the two of them and grinned.
Then Pat pulled Vincent up and swept him into a hug. “Does this mean you’re officially reformed?”
“Oh, no way, Pop. It’s worse when you succeed,” Vincent teased. “Anyhow, it was only nominated….”
The doorbell rang. Pat answered.
“We’re looking for Vincent Cappadora?” a cheerful young woman said. A Channel 5 van sat at the curb. Vincent crossed to the door. “We had to track you down here. Your buddy Rob said you were at your parents’ house.”
Even as she motioned the cameraman forward and Vincent, blushing from the collar up, began, “Nobody was more shocked than we were …” a car arrived from Channel 9 and one from the Herald-Times. By the time he got back inside, the sun was setting and Vincent—as well as Ben and Kerry, who ran upstairs to change out of her thrashed blue jeans—had been photographed everywhere from the pool deck to the kitchen.
Even Kerry’s girlfriends had been “in the neighborhood” and wanted to meet her suddenly cool brother.
About nine, yet another reporter showed up. She was older, but good-looking. Kerry answered the door. Vincent made a throat-cutting motion to his sister. He was exhausted; the baptism was at ten a.m. and the family had finally gathered around the table alone. For the first time in their married lives, the Cappadoras had ordered pizza from somewhere other than The Old Neighborhood.
“Vincent’s … worn out,” Kerry told the woman.
“Well, I’m not a TV reporter. I’m from a magazine.”
“Oh! Which one?”
“Well, I work for a number of them,” she said, with a huge smile. “Actually, I wanted to meet Ben and his wife and daughter. I would like to talk to them about how they feel about all this excitement. He wasn’t at his house and so I figured …”
“We have a family event tomorrow,” said Kerry. “That’s the most important thing to us right now. I’m so sorry.” She practically had to close the door on the woman’s foot.
“Probably an autograph seeker,” Pat teased her.
“But she went to Ben’s house. Ben’s number is unlisted. Candy makes them do that,” Kerry said. “How did she know where Ben and Eliza live?”
“They have their ways,” Beth said. “I found out a lot of things when I was a reporter.”
There were calls from the Caffertys and the Whittiers and from Sari Weegander. Feeling guilty, Beth and Pat let the machine record them.
They were all so proud.
They all said proud things.
And there were things they didn’t say as well. Nobody said a word about the pain that the rebirth of the film cost them, and would cost them in months to come.
The baptism went without a single hitch or glitch. Vincent didn’t even trip on his walk up to the baptismal font, as he had been sure he would. Beth had to admit she kept looking around for the celebrity when they exited the church into the cold sunshine to TV cameras and reporters with notebooks. The whole idea of one of her children being in the news for something wonderful, amazing, was still a dream.
It was only after the reception at home—after the guests, family, and reporters finally left—that Beth got her children alone.
In slouchy clothes, they congregated in the guest bedroom where Vincent was staying. Eliza laid the baby down. It was then that Vincent finally brought out his gift. It was a leather album for the baptism thick with lined pages for names and memories and special soft sleeves for photos and a sack with a zip for the little satin vest that was placed on Stella’s chest by the priest. Tooled in gilt was Premiere January 22: Stella for Starlight.
Lithe as a gymnast, Eliza jumped up and hugged Vincent. Ben simply tightened his lips and looked away, out the window above Vincent’s head. Beth had to steal from the room and grab her Nikon from the table where she had left it. Kerry and Eliza settled on either side of the baby, their long lush hair like twin curtains. Snap.
Beth backed up to include all of them.
In the eggshell bedroom with its scattering of throws and pillows in white and pink and palest beige—with Ben lounging in an Aran vest with his head pillowed on his hands, Kerry barefoot in gray jeans and a pink sweater crouched on her heels like a dancer, Vincent in khakis and a cashmere sweater on the floor with his back against the footboard—they looked like found objects, seashells on a beach. Snap.
Eliza transferred the baby to her breast, the corner of a cashmere blanket over her shoulder—the only visible part of her granddaughter a tiny pink fist, displayed on the lemon-colored wool like a jelly confection. Snap. Kerry slid down off the bed and nestled between her two brothers, poking both of them. Snap.
“Tell Ma what you told us,” Kerry said.
“About the phone calls? I got this phone call and the name on it said Al Gore,” Vincent said. “So I pick it up, thinking it’s, you know, Rob goofing around, and I say, ‘Hello, sir. How’s the earth holding up?’ But it’s really Al Gore. He says he’s proud of this kind of work! And I can’t say anything. Then the call-waiting beeps in. He says, fine, just wanted to say hi. It says, Unknow
n. There’s this younger voice but I know the voice. It’s Michael Moore! He says, ‘I … ah … just called because I like your movie. Made me glad I didn’t make one this year.’ I didn’t say anything for a moment and finally I said, ‘I’m in shock because Al Gore just called me.’ And he sort of giggles and says, ‘Well, you’re not up against him, either.’ And that was before ten. Can you believe this is … me?”
“Hey,” Beth said, and for an instant, all three of them looked at her. Snap. They were all alight, jubilant, uplifted in their eagerness—and facing her way.
It would make a glorious portrait, she thought, a birthday gift for each one of them. And it would have, had Beth ever printed it as she planned to do.
When she finally did make a picture of that shot, all of them were years older. But even then, she would recall the light and feel of that moment, one of the only entirely happy moments of her life.
CHAPTER SIX
On the afternoon of Oscar night, before she left for the Independent Filmmakers Dinner, Beth treated herself to a last look in the mirror. She celebrated what the New-Age foundation garments had done to her waistline beneath the thank-God-it-hadn’t-sold Carolina Herrera dress she’d found at the Lily Pad Designers Resale a few miles from her house. She marveled at her face, wishing she could somehow have it decoupaged onto herself forever. Her hair had been blown to appear as it looked in recurrent dreams she had of herself in the arms of her old boyfriends.
Ten years younger in two days, Beth decided. Easy.
She and Candy had had Botox. Botox! Just weeks ago, the idea would have knocked Beth off her perch.
But yesterday, all courtesy of Charley Seven—the reason they had tickets to the Oscars at all, and for fifteen people!—Beth and Candy and Eliza had been duck-footing around a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel that had been made over into a boutique, salon, and impromptu bar and restaurant. They were stabbing lobster-stuffed ravioli and drinking champagne. They wore haute couture jumpsuits and rubber flip-flops encrusted with sassy double rims of Swarovski crystal, which grim and glam attendants pointed out would cost two hundred dollars at retail. Their toenails had been seashelled beige and gold and their faces smelled like sour cherry pies from their Sonya Donye facial masks, rinsed away as they sat at identical sage-green marble sinks that were wheeled up to the banquette.
A long-haired girl in a black tuxedo vest and skinny satin pants had strolled in from another wing of the hotel and approached Eliza. She asked her if she was “somebody.”
“Do you mean an actress?” Eliza said. “No. I’m just the sister-in-law of someone who got nominated for Best Documentary Film.”
“But you’re going to the ceremony.”
“Yes!”
“Would you come with me anyway? Just for a minute? My boss saw you when she passed through and she has a dress she thinks no one else can wear,” said the girl. Candy went immediately on guard, like a hunting dog—always alert to the possibility that someone would steal her little Bolivian peanut and sell her into sexual slavery. But Beth poked her in the ribs and whispered something to the effect of asking if Candy was acting crazy and overprotective even for her and that Eliza was, after all, a police chief’s grown daughter.
As she left, Beth and Candy turned to each other again.
“Have we gone through the looking glass?” Candy asked.
Then the skin people took over.
The two women were spritzed with toner and slathered with a layer of grapefruit moisturizer (“Makes a man see you as ten years younger,” the slatherer explained).
“I know that much,” Beth said. “From photo shoots. The needle biz is uncharted territory.”
“I thought it was supposed to hurt,” Candy said to the physician’s assistant who erased the lines next to her nose and plumped her lower lip.
“It has the numbing substance right in it,” the physician’s assistant explained, offering Candy more champagne.
As often as Beth proffered her credit card, it was refused with a coffin-maker’s smile by one of the identical Nordic supermodel blondes who stood in ranks at dozens of makeshift display cases. In the cases were tiny palettes of eye shadow and pots of lipstick and iPhones encrusted with the names of studios and KeeBee crystal-sprinkled hair bands and Gilson negligees and Lacoste watches with diamonds at three and nine. Eliza shamelessly asked for one of everything as Beth and Candy drew back in what they imagined to be some semblance of taste. But when one of the pale girls asked Beth if she would like the same, or perhaps a Vicky’s bra sewn in real gold, she glanced at Candy, gulped, and said, “Yes. Yes, I do. Watches and … and iPhones and bras. Thirty-four B. And one for my friend too. Same size.”
And these things were placed into their hands.
Later that day, they played with their treasure on the bed like toys, letting six-month-old Stella giggle at the watches they stacked on her chubby arms.
Adriana, Pat and Beth’s godchild, Petey Ruffalo’s eldest, had spent the day caring for Stella, making sure she knew the baby’s every need. Adriana, Markey’s sister, was no longer the too-buxom high-school girl with braces who’d bused tables at the Cappadoras’ restaurant, The Old Neighborhood. The rest of her had caught up with her bosom, though she seemed to have no idea that she’d broken out of her chrysalis. A demure pre-law student in the most unlikely place on earth for subtlety, Adriana took immediately to Eliza; the two of them were immediately promising visits back and forth.
But Adriana protested the gifts. “You guys enjoy this. I go to plenty of premieres because of Dad’s being the lawyer for so many producers and stuff. I’m just loving all this. And Markey! My brother is over the moon. We’re over the moon for him!”
“You’re my godchild, too, just like Eliza. You have to take one iPod at least!” Beth insisted. “Take the Lionsgate iPhone! I like the lion.” Laughing, Adriana accepted. “So it’s law for sure, honey?” Beth asked.
“I’m not like Liza the genius or Kerry the artist. I think I’ll be a chip off the old block. Work with Daddy doing bloodless warfare for neurotics.”
Beth looked down and watched all the bling turn into so much carnival plush. She thought of Jacqueline Whittier, who had wanted to be a lawyer like her father.
“We’d better pack this up,” she told Candy.
“Did I say something wrong, Beth?” Adriana asked.
“No, honey. No. I just never had Botox before. The anesthetic’s wearing off!” She felt Candy watching her. “I need some ice!”
Adriana kissed Beth and headed for Pasadena, promising to be back at two the next day. Her apartment wasn’t far from her parents’ home. Petey and Debbie Ruffalo had asked the Cappadoras to come for dinner—and failing that, they had said they’d stop by the hotel before the Cappadoras went back to Chicago.
“She’s a hero,” said Eliza after Adriana left. “She gave her own ticket up to take care of Stella. I have to admit it’s nice not to have to worry about the baby. I just wish we’d gotten here for the Vivienne Westwood Boutique. We could have had so much more stuff, Mom. I’m a very materialistic person, Auntie Beth. You know I intend to spend my life making up to God for it by being a doctor. But … not yet.” She smoothed the jonquil dress with its slash of wine-colored sash, and repeated in awe, “I can’t believe she let me keep it. I can’t believe I’m wearing it right now! She let me keep this dress and her sewing people just made it to fit me perfectly. And you know who she is, Mom? Her father used to be this famous singer …”
“He’s still a pretty famous singer,” Beth said and laughed.
“It fit you perfectly because you’re perfect,” Candy said. “You have Vincent to thank.”
“No, we all have Charley Seven to thank,” Beth replied.
It was at Beth’s house, at the party after Stella’s baptism, that Charley, towering in green and gray like a cliff with moss on it, kissed Beth on both cheeks and said, “Congratulazioni sul bambina! Complimenti per tutto! Tutti i vostri bambini!” For Candy’s
sake, Beth explained what she understood—congratulations on the baby and all her children.
“Thank you, Charley,” Beth said. “Eliza loves the cross you gave Baby Stella.”
Charley said, “This little girl, I mean this little mama, Eliza, she was so sweet. She said, Grazie con tutti i nostri cuori. Said it perfectly! And I thought she was Jewish or perhaps Mexican.”
Beth stared at him, as though Charley had asked her if she walked to school or took her lunch.
“She converted,” Beth finally explained, trying to ignore Candy choking on her champagne.
Charley went on, “I’m an old guy, but I still got three at home. Six kids! I hope they turn out as beautiful as Petey’s kids. Adriana is a junior at UCLA, but you are aware of that. But it’s my nephew Markey that brings me to you now, Bethie. I have to speak my heart. Frankly, I didn’t even think my nephew Markey could get it up enough to pull off a heist of eggs from a chicken coop, you should pardon me. But this camera thing he did with Vincent. The kid was on fire! And now it is nominated for an Oscar!”
One of Candy’s overtime rookies passed with a tray carrying flutes of champagne and tiny glasses with two fingers of Scotch in each. Charley picked up two of those. “Salut!” said Charley, draining a glass. By the time Beth and Candy returned Charley Seven’s toast with sips of champagne, he had downed the second full shot, the tot of amber liquid disappearing as though it were spring water. “Now Markey has a future. My elderly father is overtaken with joy, Bethie. He has lived to see this boy we had some suspicion was frankly not quite right in the head do something perhaps better than any of the children. Now my father can die happy.”
“Charley, Vincent says Markey really has eyes with the lights and the camera …”
“That’s what I mean! Who could have known this?” Charley accepted and swallowed another two ounces of Scotch without moving from the spot on Beth’s granite tile where he seemed to have taken root. With the same amount of liquor in her system, Beth would have been on her knees in the powder room. “In any case, I couldn’t think of a way to thank you. I forgave Vincent some minor debt, although he refused this and I had to be in contact with his partner.” Oh, Beth breathed, thank heaven. “But I happen to know that these tickets to the Oscar ceremony are extremely hard to come by, not to mention the invitations to the ritual things the ladies like to do, the facials and the hairstyling and such.”