Cheating at Solitaire(89)

There was a little table on rollers right next to the bed. Marcey braced herself on it, very carefully, so that it did not roll out from under her. Then she braced herself on the bed. She stood up. Her back hurt. She stopped leaning against the bed and stood up absolutely straight. Her back still hurt. Her stomach was still rolling. She was still dizzy. Nothing much had changed from an hour ago, except that she thought she was pretty close to sober.

Sometimes she thought Kendra might be wrong about things, especially about publicity. It did not seem to Marcey that Kendra was becoming successful. In fact, everything Kendra did fell apart. On the other hand, Kendra did not have to be successful if she didn’t want to, because she already had money. Real money. Money made Marcey’s mouth go dry. She spent so much of it all the time. She spent it and spent it, and it was always there, but she wasn’t sure how that happened. The movies paid her. The taxes were enormous. There had to be some explanation for this.

She was wearing a hospital gown. The only clothes in the room were the ones she’d been wearing when she’d been brought in, and they were no help. They were her going-out in-public clothes. There was practically nothing to them. Marcey could feel the cool breeze on her bare behind, which meant she was in this hospital gown without underwear, and it felt awful, even though she almost never wore underwear. It was one thing to go commando because you were being daring and naughty and hoping to get a little attention, and another to have your bare rear end exposed because you’d gotten too drunk to stand up and they took your clothes. She looked around the room for anything that would suit, but all that there was were sheets and pillowcases. She tried to strip the sheet off the bed and it wouldn’t come. She saw the visitor’s chair and sat down in it. She wanted to throw up again. She wanted to pass out.

She looked around the room one more time. In the beginning, the hospital had seemed to be full of people. There was the doctor, and a nurse, and Stewart Gordon, and some people he had with him. Now she couldn’t hear anybody at all, at least anybody close, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anybody. She got onto her feet again, and this time it was better. Here was something she was good at. She could negotiate a space when she was dizzy and unsteady on her feet. She couldn’t go out with the gown like that. She couldn’t get the sheet off the bed. She looked around again and realized that there was not just a sheet, but a blanket. The blanket was folded at the foot of the bed. She didn’t have to rip out hospital corners to get it.

The blanket was heavy. It was impossible to tie around her waist like a sarong. Marcey had no idea how people managed to do that in movies. She tried tying it in a knot in front of her, which left her legs exposed in the front, but at least covered her backside, and the front of the hospital gown went down almost to her knees. She wished she had something she could use to cover up completely, like one of those things Muslim women wore. It would be the perfect disguise, if she ever decided she needed a disguise. She could go anywhere she wanted and nobody would know who she was.

She looked down at her feet, and it was just then that she realized she had no shoes. That was when all the resentment and anger and annoyance she had been feeling since they’d first gotten here finally took her over, and she admitted to herself that she didn’t just hate Margaret’s Harbor in the usual way. She hated Barbie dolls and tacos, too, but that was normal hate. It was the kind of hate you were supposed to have. She hated Margaret’s Harbor with an emotion so deep it split her in half. She hated the twin sets and the A-line skirts and the books that were absolutely everywhere. She hated the weather. She hated the women with their snow boots and espadrilles and faces that had never seen a facelift. What was wrong with all these people here? Who did they think they were? She didn’t care if presidents of the United States had vacationed here. Presidents of the United States were boring.

She hobbled over to the side table, where somebody had left her clothes, folded, and got her shoes. They weren’t much better than going barefoot, but they would have to do. They were all she had. If this were a movie, she would be able to go through the rooms without being seen and find something to wear. She would never get away with that on her own.

It didn’t matter. What did matter was getting out of here, and she was going to get.

3

Stewart Gordon knew that there were times, these days, when he was just a cartoon of himself, but he also knew that he had tried and failed to find any other way to handle the changes in the world he had to live in. He was very careful never to tell anyone that he wished he had not taken that part in that “damned science fiction television show,” as one of his fellow cast members had put in, in the London Guardian, in the middle of a rant about the tyranny of middlebrow. He wasn’t sorry he’d taken that part. It had made him financially independent even without the residuals, and with them it had made him more than comfortable. These days, he got the work he wanted, just because he wanted it. He never had to take work just to work. He took vacations when he wanted to take them. He bought the books he wanted to read. He went to the theater when he felt like it. There was a lot to be said for financial independence, and he didn’t mind saying it, no matter what sort of effect it had on his standing as an unrepentant socialist of the sixties generation.