The crowd has not broken up completely outside of my doorway, and I can still hear the murmuring of disappointment among the reporters as they begin to drift back to their desks. As I listen to Sheba, who begins to talk easily to me, I study her at my leisure. It is easy to forget about Sheba’s thoughtless cargo of pure sex appeal. Her voice, husky and familiar, sounds like one of the most seductive forms that lovemaking can take. She has taken possession of the entire building by the simple fact that she entered it.
Only one person has noticed that her entrance was unauthorized. There is a peremptory knock on my door without a trace of caution behind it. Blossom Limestone, the gladiatorial gatekeeper who checks visitors in and out of the newspaper with all the efficiency of the marine drill instructor she once was, has muscled her way through the crowd and walked right into my office. She places a muscular black hand on Sheba’s right shoulder, but looks at me when she scolds, “Your fancy friend did not go through proper channels—again.”
“She hasn’t been here in three years, Blossom,” I say.
“She can sign in at the front desk just like everyone else.”
“I love the feel of your hand on my shoulder, Blossom, darling,” says Sheba, taking the large hand and holding it against one of her own ample breasts. “I’ve always loved the gentle lesbian touch. They and they alone know how to make a woman feel right. They get right to the point—no gamesmanship, no role-playing.”
Blossom snatches her hand away as though it touched a burning coal. “Lesbian?” she asks. “I got three sons, and you’s barren as a dump truck last time I checked. Now, sign this piece of paper and the time you got here.”
Sheba signs with a flourish, her signature taking up four spaces on the log sheet, and there is boldness even in its illegibility. Then she says, “I came in where the delivery trucks load up. My brother and I used to help Leo on his paper route. I was a regular here long before you came, Blossom, angel.”
“So I’ve heard,” Blossom says. “Sign in with me next time, Miss Poe, just like everyone else.”
“I thought it was so cute the last time,” Sheba says. “You sold my signature for fifty bucks. Or was it sixty?”
Blossom looks shaken by the revelation, then recovers. “I sell it or someone steals it.”
Again, a small crowd has gathered at the doorway watching the fireworks between the two strong-willed women. Sheba has not noticed the audience until she turns around and sees their hushed, expectant faces. I prepare myself for the worst, and the worst comes as I am forming the thought.
“Let me sign your left tit, Blossom. No telling what you could get for that,” Sheba says.
The reporters by the door exhale audibly. They would have laughed out loud except for their deep respect for Blossom, who fields the responses of the crazies who charge her reception desk at the first appearance of an article that offends their paranoid sensibilities. I can see that the remark has cut Blossom deeply. “She didn’t mean that, Blossom. Sheba can’t help playing to the crowd. She’s a nice girl.”
“She might be a lot of things, Leo. A nice girl is not one of them.” Blossom snorts. “She’s come back to you because she’s after something. You watch yourself.”
I clap my hands and order, “All of you, get out of here. I’ve got a column to write for Sunday and a deadline to get it in.”
When we are alone again, Sheba looks up with the only expression of hers that can pass for shyness. Then both of us laugh and hug like a brother and sister. “I’m sorry I act like that, Leo.”
“I’ll get over it.”
“I do it to everybody, I promise. You’re not the only one,” she whispers in my ear.
“I know, Sheba. You can be anything you want around me. I know who you are; don’t forget that. Why are you in town?”
“Besides the fact that I’m washed up? Used up like a snot rag? My agent hasn’t had a call for a starring role in over a year. I’m thirty-eight. For a woman in Hollywood, that’s like being a thousand.”
“That may all be true,” I say. “But that’s not why you’re here.”
“I came back to see my old friends,” she says. “I need to get back to what I once was, Leo; surely you can understand that.”
“But none of us has seen you more than ten times since we graduated.”
“But I call. You’ve got to admit I’m good about checking in by phone.”
I cover my eyes with my hands. “You phone drunk, Sheba. You phone stoned. Do you know you asked me to marry you the last time you called?”
“What did you say?”
“That I’d divorce Starla and gladly marry you.”
“You and Starla aren’t really married, and you never have been.”
“I’ve got the papers to prove it,” I say.
Sheba says with a cruel, bladelike quality, “It was a sham love affair. A worse than sham marriage. And it’s caused you to live a sham life.”
“You can’t fool me. You came back just to inflate my ego,” I say. “Before you arrived, Sheba, I was feeling kind of successful here in Charleston.”
“None of my Hollywood friends has ever heard of you.”
“Are they the same ones who quit calling your agent?”
“The same ones.”
“You’ve been nominated for two Academy Awards for best actress,” I say. “You won an Oscar for best supporting actress. That’s a great career.”
“But I didn’t win best actress. A nomination means zip for your career. It’s like choosing to sleep with the gofer or the best boy on location, instead of shacking up with the leading man.”
“You’ve done okay with leading men,” I say.
She smiles. “Married four of them. Slept with all of them.”
“Can I quote you?” I ask, moving toward my typewriter.
“Of course not.”
“Okay, Sheba. I ask very little of you. Just give me enough salacious gossip and unexpected rumor so that I can knock off a column for Sunday. Then we can blow this joint and get drunk with our friends.”
“Ha!” she says. “You’re using me. Exploiting my world fame.”
“It hurts me you’d even imply such a thing.” My fingers hang over the keys of my typewriter.
“No one knows about my divorce from Troy Springer. That’s breaking news,” she says.
“Was he your fourth or fifth husband?” I ask while typing.
“Why’re you so fixated with numbers?”
“Accuracy. You’ll often find that among reporters. Why’re you getting divorced from Troy? People magazine called him one of the handsomest men in Hollywood.”
“I bought a vibrator that has more personality and does its job better.”
“Give me something I can use in a family newspaper,” I say.
“Our careers had been growing apart, especially after I found him banging the kid in the hot tub.”
“You took that as a bad sign?”
“Yeah, I was trying to get pregnant at the time,” she says.
“Can you remember all of your ex-husbands’ names?”
“I can’t even remember what half of them looked like.”
“The worst person you ever met in Hollywood?”
“Carl Sedgwick, my first husband,” she says without hesitation.
“The best person?”
“Carl Sedgwick again. That’s how illusory and contradictory that city is.”
“What keeps you there?”
“The belief that I’ll one day be given the best role ever handed to an American actress.”
“What keeps you from going mad while you wait?”
“Big peckers. Strong drink. A ready access to pharmaceuticals.”
“You can get the liquor here in Charleston.”
“A martini tastes a lot better when you hear the Pacific crashing into the cliffs below you.”
“Can I just say you’re dating a pharmacist?” I ask.
“You most certainly cannot!”
&n
bsp; “What do you miss most about Charleston?”
“I miss my childhood friends, Leo. I miss the girl I was who first drove into this city.”
“Why?”
“Because I had not laid waste to my own life then. I think I was a nice girl then. Didn’t you think so, Leo?”
I look up at her, and still see the lost girl she is talking about. “I never saw a girl like you, Sheba. Before or since.” As I watch her, the journalist inside me wages war against the young boy who was Sheba’s first friend in this city. The journalist is a cold man, bloodless in the pursuit of his profession, paid to be a voyeur and not a participant in the passion plays I enter with my notebook open. Detachment is my theme. As I watch her open up her wounds, I do not mourn for the girl she misplaced on the day we met, but instead for the disappearance of that offbeat, miserable boy who took a batch of benne wafers across the street to welcome a pair of long-suffering twins to the neighborhood. In turning myself into a reporter, I extinguished all the fires that boy displayed as proof of his worth and humanity. Though I can be objective about Sheba’s life, I have long ago lost any ability in taking stock of my own. She continues to talk with a nakedness of spirit I have never seen in Sheba.
“And what did I do with that girl? The one you liked so much? The friend you came to love?” she asks.
“You answered the bell,” I say as I type. “You had a calling and a vocation, and you never questioned it or looked back. No one could stop you or stand in your way. The rest of us followed our destinies, the way most of mankind does. You grabbed hold of your own dreams of yourself. You rode it out of town, took it to the limit. Few people do that.”
Sheba lifts her hand above her, closes her eyes, and makes a motion as though she is erasing an invisible blackboard. “You make it sound noble. But you know that girl well, Leo. She considered acting to be a writ of the highest order, and there were times she was right. That girl became the toast of Hollywood. But then the crow’s-feet appeared near the eyes, her skin began its coarsening, and she could not laugh during close-ups because of three distinct lines on her forehead. I’ve never had a husband who didn’t suggest I have a face-lift. So the girl gets scared in the middle of the journey and gets so eager to please that she starts accepting every role they throw at her: bimbos and nymphomaniacs, shoplifters and anorexic soccer moms who turn into serial killers.”
“I thought that was one of your best roles.”
“The script was dead on arrival,” she says. “But thanks, Leo. Remember London?”
“Never forget it.”
“I played Ophelia on the London stage. I was twenty-four years old, and all of England went crackers when they chose this unknown American broad to play this suicidal Danish girl. All of you Charleston friends came over for the opening. Trevor flew out from San Francisco with his new lover. What was that boy’s name?”
“I think that was Joey,” I say.
“No, Joey never saw me in Hamlet,” she says. “I think that might’ve been Michael the first.”
“It was Michael the second. I never met Michael the first.”
“Whatever. Trevor changed boys like flip-flops in those days,” she remembers. “Do you remember the party you guys gave me after the first night? What was that restaurant?”
“It was called L’Etoile. I still go there when I’m in London. Remember when the reviews came in? The critics said there had never been an Ophelia like you before. Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier came backstage to congratulate you. It was one of the great nights of all of our lives.”
Sheba smiles, then darkens again. “Last year, the same theater called from London. This time they wanted me to play Gertrude, Hamlet’s bitch of a mother. I’m not yet a hag, Leo. Give me another year or two. Though I’ve abused them quite seriously, this face and this body can still play a young, beautiful woman with devastating wit and effectiveness. There are seven women more beautiful than I am in Hollywood today, but only seven. And I can bury most of those dwarves by the force of my personality and the power of my acting. Do I see the hag forming in this face? I do. I see everything in this face. Every flaw, every wrinkle, every imperfection that sneaks up on me as I sleep off a hangover or pretend to have an orgasm with the new Hollywood flavor of the month. I feel like I should approach every mirror with a gun in my hand.”
“Whoa, girl,” I caution. “We’re sliding out of great acting into melodrama.”
“I don’t need to act with you, Leo. That’s one of the reasons I’m back here.”
“You’ll be a beautiful old woman,” I say, looking up at her again.
She throws her head back, laughing. “I’ll never be an old woman. That is a promise. And that, sir, you can print.”
“What’s the real reason you’re back?” I ask. “Is it to check on your mother?”
“That’s one of the reasons. But there’s one other …” She trails off, and then the phone rings.
“Hello,” I say. “Oh, hey, Molly. Yeah, you heard right. She’s sitting right here in my office. Everyone’s going to meet at your house for drinks and dinner?” I place my hand over the phone and say, “Word’s out. You got plans for the night? Molly’s called the gang, and they’re all rallying at her house.”
Sheba says, “Tell her I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“She’d love to come, Molly. See you at six. I’ll tell her the guesthouse is ready.”
A knock at the door interrupts us again. I can tell the sheer weight of Sheba’s celebrity is about to overwhelm us. The moment of intimacy has come and passed out of both of our reaches. I yell, “Come on in.” The youngest journalists in the newsroom have summoned the courage to knock and ask me to introduce them to Sheba. Amelia Evans steps through the door first and says, after apologizing to Sheba, “Leo, I’m going to get fired if I don’t get an interview with Ms. Poe before she leaves the building.”
“Sheba, this is Amelia Evans, fresh out of Chapel Hill. Editor in chief of the Daily Tar Heel. Hottest young reporter we got. We’re lucky to have her. This is Sheba Poe, Amelia.”
“Is it true you dated Leo in high school, Miss Poe?” Amelia asks, before she gets permission to conduct the interview.
I can feel the tops of my ears burning as the blush catches my whole face off guard. I say, “No, we never dated. We were just friends.”
A grin of mischief crosses Sheba’s face as she watches my squirming. “Leo and his modesty! He just made love to me on his mahogany desk, and then he pretends we never dated.”
“This newspaper is too cheap even to buy the publisher a toilet seat made out of mahogany. Amelia, take Sheba to meet her fans in the newsroom, then interview her in the library. I’ll finish my column, then come get her. Behave yourself, Sheba.”
“Since he was a very young man, Leo always had the sexual appetite of one of the great apes,” Sheba says.
Ellen Wackenhut, who came to work in the newsroom the same year I did and who is now the science editor, hears the remark as she passes. She sticks her head in and says, “The sexual appetite of a great ape? What else haven’t you told me about yourself, Leo?”
“That I made lousy friends in high school,” I answer.
Ellen says, “What one word describes Leo in high school?”
Sheba pauses, then says, “Edible.”
“Get Nathalie,” Ellen calls out through the newsroom. “Where’s the food editor when we’ve got a homegrown story?”
“Newsroom humor,” I say to Sheba. “One soon tires of it. Get Sheba out of here, Amelia.”
“These people are fine. I’d like to work up here,” Sheba says.
“They’re journalists, Sheba. These are poor, desperate souls. Working for starvation wages that couldn’t keep you in makeup for a month.”
Playing to Amelia and rising out of her chair, Sheba says to me, “I never wear makeup, dear. What you think is makeup is simply great acting.”
After turning in my copy, I meet Sheba in the employee parking
lot, open the passenger-side door, lean in, and throw empty drink containers, fast-food wrappers, half-empty popcorn boxes, and a catcher’s mitt into the backseat. With a theatrical gesture, I motion for Sheba to enter. She gives it the once-over, then enters with that resigned look of a tourist who has just been offered a ride on the back of a mule.
As I turn onto King Street, she asks, more out of politeness than curiosity, “What kind of car is this anyway?”
“It’s called a Buick LeSabre.”
“I’ve heard of them,” she says. “Not a single soul I know owns one or would ever even think about buying one. Don’t you buy this kind of car for a servant? Or when you start getting social security?”
“I’m a Buick kind of guy. My grandfather sold them for a living.”
“I never knew that. That might be the most boring fact I’ve ever heard.”
“I have a wealth of boring facts,” I say. “What do you drive in Hollywood-goddamn-California?”
“I’ve got six cars,” Sheba says. “One’s a Porsche. One’s a Maserati. Four are something else.”
“Sounds like you’re not much into cars.”
“My new ex-husband’s nuts for them. He talked to them when he polished them.”
“Was he a nice guy? Before he started screwing starlets?”
She leans over and grabs my hand, a sweet and sisterly gesture. “I don’t marry nice guys, Leo. Surely you know that by now. And you haven’t exactly dazzled in your choice of women.”
“Ouch,” I say.
“You seen your wife lately?” Sheba is watching me carefully.
“She came back last year. Stayed for a couple of months. Then lost it again. We had some good times while it lasted.”
“You need to Aretha Franklin that girl,” Sheba says, then begins singing “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”
“They made me take vows,” I say. “I took them seriously.”
“I’ve taken those same vows—lots of different times. They talk about richer or poorer, better or worse. That kind of crap. Those vows don’t say nothin’ about being padded-cell crazy, do they?”
“I knew there were problems when I married Starla, so I didn’t walk into that marriage blind. I believed in the power of love then.”