Hide & Seek - James Patterson [59]
“Caputo!” Will grinned as the director squeezed his wide body into the backseat.
“They're going to crucify us,” Caputo said, his face mournful. “I just know it. My instincts are always right. Aren't my instincts right, Will? Comes from growing up in Brooklyn. People from Brooklyn have great instincts.”
He was so comically miserable I had to laugh.
“People are expecting big things from this film,” Caputo said. “As well they should for fifty mil—but Will and I both know they're getting sheep shit. Australian sheep shit. Not even the good stuff.”
Will laughed at the director's humor, which was nearly as dark as his own.
“Where's your wife?” I asked. “She doesn't seem to have had any more luck calming you down than I've had with Will.”
“Eleanor's in the car ahead of us with my saintly mother. They can't stand me when I get meshuga like this. They kicked me out of my own car. So I'm here. Somebody's got to take me to the theater.”
I opened the car door, and pulled Jennie along with me.
“Where are you going?” Will asked.
“To join Eleanor, and Michael's mother. You two artistes deserve to be alone together.”
CHAPTER 67
I REJOINED WILL when we reached the Ziegfeld, and we got through the searchlights, the screaming crowds, the reporters, the studio executives, and settled ourselves into our seats of honor.
Neither Jennie nor I had ever been to a world premiere. It was actually great fun. Everyone looked so wonderfully inappropriate in their tuxes, dark suits, and party gowns—just to go see a movie.
In about fifteen minutes, the picture started and the credits rolled. WILL SHEPHERD. There his name was, as large as Suzanne Purcell's. Even before the title appeared the crowd applauded, and I heard Will grunt. I'm not sure whether it was from fear or pleasure.
Then the movie started, and I was caught up in the gorgeous shots of the American West. Nestor Keresty had seen beauty in the landscape that I had not and had made his art come alive on the screen.
Will delivered the foal, carried it to his young wife (she looks closer to thirty than nineteen, I noted with satisfaction), and delivered his dreaded line.
The audience was quiet. No one snickered. Will finally relaxed in the seat beside me. Jennie flashed him a thumbs-up. “See?” she whispered. “Told you so.”
The movie went on for a little more than two hours. It was fast-paced, hokey, lush, romantic. I found myself enjoying it—until North came up on Ellie in the tub and began to wash her.
The way Will looked at her was the way he looked at me when we made love. It didn't look as though he were acting; it was desire in his eyes, lust. His hand disappeared under the suds, but I sensed, just by the way his arm moved, what he was really doing.
My heart clutched. Suddenly I couldn't breathe. I had to sit up very straight in my theater seat.
They've been to bed together, I thought, and a dull ache spread through my body. I remembered the rumors in the press, and Will's firm denial of them. They were lovers off-screen, weren't they? Oh please, don't let that be true.
I made myself look at Will then. He was watching the screen intently, his mouth half open—reliving it!
When the interminable love scene finished, Will leaned over and tenderly kissed my cheek. “I was acting, Maggie,” he whispered. “I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. Maybe I am an actor.”
I sighed, breathed deeply, and began to feel a little better. Yes, maybe Will was an actor, after all.
CHAPTER 68
THE GLITZY PREMIERE party for Primrose was held privately upstairs at the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh Street. A hundred or more people came over to shake Will's hand and tell him how superb he was. He recognized none of them, and only acknowledged their praise with an abstracted nod.
He was somewhere else, actually. He was looking for his mother and his father. Their ghosts, he knew, would not miss an opportunity as grand as this.
He was losing it big time, wasn't he? Yes, this was Rio