Page 32 of Under the Stars

She lifts an eyebrow at me. “I’m very worried about this cow, honeybee.”

“Cow? What cow?”

“This pregnant cow on a ranch out in Kansas. Her name is 88.”

“Eighty-eight? The number?”

“He calls them by the numbers on their ear tags. The rancher who posts about her on Twitter? X? Whatever it’s called now.

Eighty-eight is the number on her ear tag.

” Meredith flips her phone around to show me a video of a gigantically pregnant red cow, waddling in painful steps toward a pile of hay. “She’s due any minute.”

“Oh my God. I’ve never seen anything that pregnant. It’s got to be twins, right?”

She turns the phone back to face her. “Well, they’re not sure. I guess cow obstetrics aren’t as advanced as for people? I just feel so awful for the poor thing. When she finally goes into labor…” Meredith grimaces.

“Meredith,” I say, “I think it’s time for you to get off the internet for a while.”

“I was in labor with you for two whole days before they finally gave me an emergency C-section.”

“Yes, Meredith. I’ve heard that story a million times. You were traumatized. It’s why I don’t have any siblings.”

“You had a conehead for weeks. I thought you were permanently deformed.” She looks back at her screen. “God, it hurts just thinking about her trying to push that thing out. I don’t think it’s anatomically possible, do you?”

“You know what? Let’s take a walk or something. Or a bicycle ride. You’ve been cooped up at Greyfriars for weeks now.”

“I like it here.”

“Let me make you some dinner. I brought back some shrimp from the—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Audrey. Are you worried about me?”

“Meredith, I’ve spent most of my life worried about you. If I’m not worried about you drinking, I’m worried about you not drinking. Like what are you doing with your time? Besides swimming? And what’s with all the swimming?”

She lowers her phone to glare at me. “What do you care? You’re at the Mo with Mike all day long.”

“Oh, is that what it is? You’re jealous because I’m finally spending a little time with my own father ?”

Meredith shoves her feet in her pool slides and turns for the lawn.

—

I catch up with her about halfway up the slope to the house.

“So. Have you ever heard of a painter called Henry Irving?” I ask.

“I’m not a total idiot, honeybee. Even if I didn’t spend four very expensive years at a fancy private college.” She glances at me. “He did that portrait of Jefferson, right? The one right before he died?”

“Exactly. Among others. And those massive historical landscapes. The Burr-Hamilton duel, the one that’s hanging in the Getty, you took me to see when I was ten?

But get this . It turns out, he was also painting spectacularly erotic nudes of Mike’s great-great-great-grandmother.

Which I guess makes her my four -greats-grandmother? ”

Meredith stops marching and turns to me. “ What did you say?”

“That’s why we were up at Monk Adams’s house today. I guess his wife is some kind of art expert? We found this painting in a trunk that’s been sitting in the Mo’s basement for a million years, apparently, so we drove up—”

“We? Who’s we ? You and Mike?”

“No. Mike’s busy with the plumbers. Sedge Peabody drove me up.”

“Sedge. Peabody. ” She gives each word its own emphasis. “One of the Summerly Peabodys? He’s a friend of yours?”

“Meredith, I told you. He’s helping with the renovation.”

I make my best attempt at a poker face while Meredith sizes me up. Still, the blood burns in my cheeks. It’s a relief when Meredith turns and resumes her march to the house.

“So you found this painting and Monk Adams’s wife tells you it’s an Irving ?”

“That’s right. She recognized it by the signature. That was his trademark, hiding his initials somewhere on the subject’s foot. Sort of the nineteenth-century equivalent of the humblebrag.”

“Fucking Brahmins,” she says.

“But here’s the cool thing. Apparently it’s nothing like his other paintings, Mallory says.”

“Mallory who again?”

“Adams. Monk’s wife. All the rest of his work is like what we saw at that Getty retrospective.

You know, formal portraits and historical dramas.

This painting—Meredith, it’s so intimate .

It’s like you can touch her. It’s like she’s breathing right there on the canvas.

Mallory was blown away. She’s going to do some research for us and figure out when he might have painted it.

Why he might have painted it. I mean, obviously they were lovers.

There’s absolutely no way Irving wasn’t fucking the brains out of this woman in the painting.

So how did Mike’s whatever-great-grandmother end up here ?

On Winthrop Island? Married to Mike’s whatever-great-grandfather?

Mallory says it could be the biggest art find of the century.

She practically passed out, she was so excited. ”

We reach the terrace. Meredith heads for the French doors of the sunroom and flings one open without a pause. “Wow. It does sound very exciting, honeybee.”

“Meredith, weren’t you listening? The greatest art find of the century ! And there’s more of them. There’s a whole trunk full of this shit.”

“Well, good for Mike. He’ll be set for life.

” She pauses at the bottom of the back stairs, hand on the newel post. “I’m just going to take a quick shower before dinner.

Would you mind running lines with me after we eat?

I seriously need to be word perfect before we start filming, and I swear to God, this screenwriter thinks he’s Sorkin or something. ”

—

If I could run a thread through the days and weeks of my childhood, connecting them all, it would bear the name Running Lines .

I learned to read when I was three years old.

Everyone has a talent, I guess. I don’t remember a time when my best friend was not a book.

Meredith used to marvel at me. She thought it was a cool party trick.

She would wake me up at midnight and haul me before the crowd gathered in her apartment, drinking their cocktails and God knows what else, and put some Shakespeare in my hands, for example, and obediently I would read aloud, with feeling, not stumbling once.

I didn’t mind. The attention fed my heart.

The approval. My mother’s face beaming at me.

See? What did I tell you? She’s a genius!

Meredith would say, before she packed me back off to bed with a kiss.

She would also put my skills to more practical use.

From probably the day we arrived in California, she sat me down in the evening with some script from her acting class, or for an audition the next day, and I would feed her the line prompts, over and over, until she was secure.

If the role was a small one, we would do the other parts too.

When she started winning roles, I learned to play her scene partner.

I remember how much pride I took in acting out my part, in giving her what she needed.

She would ask for my advice—what did the screenwriter mean, how should she deliver this line.

When she got the role in Tiny Little Thing, the triumph seemed as much mine as hers—at least in my own heart, I guess.

This is it, honeybee, she would say, as we worked the scenes together. I can feel this character in my bones.

I still remember the excitement I felt in those weeks. We were going to make it at last! Happiness was around the corner.

What I did not understand then—which I understand now—is that we were already as happy together as we were ever going to get.

To sit down with Meredith and run lines was to interact with her at her most intimate, her most vulnerable.

There was nothing else we did together that made me feel this close to her.

Nothing else that shed so much of her attention on me alone. Just the two of us.

So I kept on running lines, evening after evening, no matter what had passed between us during the day.

Even when I was home from boarding school and college, when I wanted to shove Meredith away with both hands, reject everything about her and her Hollywood life, I could never resist the invitation— Let’s sit down after dinner and run lines, honeybee. I could really use your help.

This role she starts filming in August is, I have to admit, as plum as her agent sold me.

She plays this woman named Ruth whose estranged twin sister marries a Soviet agent, a mole buried inside the State Department who defects to Moscow with his family in 1952, and Ruth travels to Russia to help her sister escape back to the West. Meredith’s older than her character, but the director wanted someone who had the right seasoning, this wise polish you don’t see in younger actresses anymore, and Meredith looks at least a decade younger than her actual age anyway.

We settle down in the sunroom after dinner, just like old times except there is no glass of vodka and tonic in Meredith’s hand, no glass of wine in mine—just water.

The script is sharp, witty. We’re reading this scene between Ruth and her sister, who are orphans.

( Why are they always orphans? I ask Meredith, and she says, It’s all Tolstoy, honeybee—you can’t make a movie about a happy family, it would bore everyone to death.

) Cynical Ruth smells a rat in this guy, the one who turns out to be a traitor, and wants her sister to board an ocean liner with her and leave the guy behind.

But her sister’s in love. Her sister’s a romantic.

For the first time, she sticks up for herself, and Ruth realizes she’s lost the trust of the one person she loves.

The one person whose loyalty she could count on.

Her sister made a choice, and it wasn’t Ruth.

So Ruth gets on board the ocean liner and departs for New York, leaving her sister behind.

“I feel like you relate to this role,” I say to Meredith, when we finish the scene.

“I find a way to relate to all my roles, honeybee. It’s my job.”

“I mean the leaving behind. The moving on.”

Meredith sips the last of her water. At this point, most people get too aggressive and bump the ice cubes against their noses, but not Meredith.

“You either leave or you get left, Audrey,” she says. “It’s your choice.”

—

Having avoided my phone all evening, I’m not surprised to find the screen stacked with notifications as I settle into bed.

An email from the lawyer. An email from the accountant.

A text from Sedge Peabody, sent around half past seven, as I was whipping up a shrimp and quinoa risotto for Meredith’s dinner.

I can’t stop thinking about you. When can I see you again?

I slump back against the pillow and close my eyes.

—

It turned out, Sedge Peabody is a spectacular kisser.

As we lay together on the beach this afternoon—was it only this afternoon?

—I remember I felt like the inside of a peach, nibbled away bit by bit.

I remember clawing at his shirt and up his back, until his hand crept under my shirt and up my front, stopping just at the underside of my left breast. Then he pulled away and brushed the side of my cheek with his thumb and said we had probably better get back to the Mo before Mike cut his balls off.

“I really don’t think Mike feels that level of fatherly concern for my chastity,” I told him.

Sedge kissed the tip of my nose in the same tender way Mallory Adams’s husband had kissed hers. “He would if he could see the thoughts running through my head right now.”

“Erotic artwork will do that to you,” I said.

He laughed. He was breathing a little hard, I remember noticing. Not quite so much self-control as it seemed. “Believe me, the art has nothing to do with it.”

Then he climbed to his feet, pulled me up from the sand, and carried me piggyback up the bluff.

We might have crossed that meadow hand in hand an hour earlier, but we returned with our hands shoved in our pockets.

Stealing smiles at each other. A bit afraid, I think—a bit shy of what had mushroomed up between us, and how it might grow.

Without a word, Sedge drove us back to the Mo, where we told Mike about our visit to Mallory Adams— How the fuck is that asshole Monk, he wanted to know, I gave that fucker his start —and said that Mallory would be coming down tomorrow to take a look at the rest of the paintings in the trunk and figure out what to do next.

She thought it was best to keep this thing under wraps until we knew exactly what we had.

Fine, said Mike. And in the meantime, I need you to unpack all these fancy fucking ingredients that just arrived on the afternoon ferry.

So I got back to work organizing the kitchen, and Sedge drove back to Summerly to help his grandmother figure out the sleeping plan for the deluge of cousins arriving for Memorial Day weekend, and as I bicycled back to Greyfriars at six o’clock, I thought that was that.

A little harmless smooching to cut the undeniable sexual tension, which had arisen out of the stress of renovation and the discovery of the hot art, and the fact that I hadn’t kissed anybody since before Christmas.

Now this message.

I can’t stop thinking about you.

When can I see you again?

There is a pain in my chest. I’m not sure if it’s real or imaginary. Am I having a heart attack, or heartburn, or just heartache?

You either leave or you get left, Audrey. It’s your choice.

I set the phone on the bedside table and turn out the light.