'The Perfect Hostess'

'Room In New York' by Edward Hopper

'The Perfect Hostess'

He could not love a stranger, and that’s all that she was too him now, no different from the faceless people that walked along the sidewalk below him. It was the memory of her he was in love with- as she had been before, when he had first known her in their early years, but the illness became apparent.

Larry sat down in his chair with a heavy sigh. It was a relief to be home- the old familiar room, the same wallpaper and carpet that had always been there- none of that had changed and he was glad for familiarity of it all. It was a great sense of comfort after the repetitive bleakness of hospital walls.

Light notes of music covered the silence of the room. Larry knew she was at the piano, pressing the one same note over and over. They’d brought it 6 months ago, with the paycheck from her last cinematic appearance. Alice gladly told people she was teaching herself the piano and would take singing lessons too. She always told people with such pride that she was going to be musical, Larry had his doubts and it proved true when she abandoned it within weeks. She pleaded with Larry to get rid of it, but it’d been so much trouble getting the damned thing up the stairs to their apartment they were keeping it.

Larry leaned forward and picked up the newspaper on the table. It was from a couple of days ago, ‘Has it been that long since either of us were here?’ He thought. Maybe two months since he was last here? He’d been in New York for three days but never visited the apartment- he’d gone straight to the hospital to see Alice. He looked up from the newspaper over to her. She was wearing her red dress, the one she’d been wearing when they took her into the hospital last Thursday. It was crumpled and messy, but Larry was not surprised with all the fight she had put up with the nurses and everyone else.

Larry thought back to when they first met- before she was ill, he liked too think, but he suspected that she may have been ill for a lot longer but he had not noticed. Perhaps he passed it off as moodiness, or that all actresses behaved like this- they were used to top treatment. It was backstage of the theatre they first met, Larry gone to greet the cast, and he secretly hoped he would get to meet Alice.

Larry knew of Alice Rains before he had met her, most had- she was the biggest box office draw in America in 1946. Larry had seen her in three or four films before they met, he always did have a soft spot for her. She’d told him years later that she moved from movies to Broadway because she’d wanted to be a real actress, see what it was like to really be put under pressure and sustain a character for a lengthy period of time. His second play went to Broadway, something he was very proud of, and he was equally pleased when he found out that Alice Rains would star. He’d wanted to go and watch the rehearsals but he was working in L.A, working on a script for a romantic comedy for the studio. He rushed through his work as quickly as he could, and managed to be free to go and see his play open on Broadway. After the show the director had brought Larry backstage to meet and greet with most of the actors who all seemed to put on a welcoming greeting, but Larry guessed their true feelings didn’t amount to much. As the director leading him down the hallway they came to Alice’s dressing room.

The first image Larry saw of her was her reflection in the mirror. She was facing away from him, but her reflection seemed to look straight into him. Larry thought she looked better in the flesh than in the movies- her dark, velvet eyes, porcelain skin and raven black hair. She had a dark beauty like no other. She spun around in the chair and greeted Larry so courteously he could not fail to fall for her charm.

She was married then, when they first meet, but she left her husband soon after. Larry guessed she’d been looking for an excuse and Larry entered right on his cue. They both alternated between New York and L.A. depending on their work- most of the time moving together, thought there were often periods where they would be separated for weeks and months at a time. They wrote each other long letters- Larry kept all of hers in his desk in New York, Alice assured him she had kept the love letters he sent her, but Larry had no idea where she kept them. The letters rambled on for pages about their burning desire to see each other again, the large chunk of them that was missing, and so on and so. The one Larry had treasured most of all went along these lines-
“Oh, Larry-kin, oh dear the days are far too long and every time I close my eyes I find you are here with me and you hold me in those loving arms of yours to take me away and protecting from all the nasty people here. Then when I wake up and she you’re not here I cry to myself because it’s only a dream, but I count the days till I finish here and I can come back to you and we can be together again… much love and tears and kissing, your Alice from Wonderland”
Those two years were the happiest Larry could remember. They had only argued once when he had called her to say he was going to stop in New York a couple of extra days. She screamed down the phone at him, screaming that he did not love her and that he was going to leave her for some woman with loose morals, or worse- a dancer. Larry did his best to reassure her. When he finally got to L.A three days later he was told she was ill and would not see him. Then a day later she appeared at his hotel and threw herself into his arms, and they had made love soon after as if the last days were a fiction.
Larry thought she had always seemed happier at her home in L.A. He’d take her back tomorrow morning. He knew she’d be happier there, as she used to be, Larry thought- it was a last attempt. The house in L.A. was 5 times the size of the New York apartment and Alice loved throwing parties for everybody and anybody in the movie industry. Alice was always the perfect hostess, making sure each and every person in the room felt her presence and she was in total control.
There had been one time, with two older British actors when her perfect hostess act slipped. The actors were both invited to one of Alice’s parties, except one had told the other that it was a fancy dress ball as a practical joke. So, the one actor turned up dressed as a harlequin, much to his embarrassment when he realized the joke. He’d seen the lighter side of it, but Alice did not. Her face froze in shock, and when it melted she stormed up to the harlequin, ripped off his mask and ordered him and his wife from the house. They thought she was joking, but Alice had surprising strength when she was angry and virtually pushed them outside and refused them entry. Once they’d gone Alice had run upstairs, Larry followed and then returned five minutes later and informed the guests that Alice had a headache.
Over the years Larry had heard those that she was working with complaining about her, that she could one day be screaming and shouting at people, then deathly silent and still and sometimes perfectly charming. She was mostly charming to people whenever shooting began, but soon Larry would hear reports of problems. In the early years that’s all they were to Larry- reports of unhappiness, she kept that side of nature hidden from him for the most part, but in the last 18 months he’d seen the other side to her, the one only talked about it bitter terms by co-stars and directors. Larry began to fear her a little, and pandered to her whims more and more afraid of an outburst. One night when she had ripped into him for coming home later she had threatened to kill herself, so Larry had taken all the pills in the house and flushed them down the toilet. The next morning Larry awoke from the sofa to hear Alice laughing hysterically, and he found her laughing at the empty medicine cabinet.
It was three months ago, just when the summer of ‘54 had started than Larry nervously told Alice he’d been contracted to go to L.A. to work on the script for MGM. Alice had politely smiled and told him that was fine, she’d come to see him just as soon as her play finished in a few months time. Larry had breathed a sigh of relief and left two weeks later. They written each other long letters as they normally did and ran up long telephone bills, but Larry was began to feel like an actor. He was just repeating things he’d said to her years ago just to keep on her good side- he loved her good side. That side of her was the woman he’d fallen in love, the other side of her scared him. Once arriving at the studio office he was told he would be co-writing the script. Larry was put aback at this as he had never written with anyone before, and even more shocked was he when he learnt it was to be a woman he was to work with. He knew that it was her novel he was meant to be adapting, but he did not expect to be adapting it with the author herself. When they first meet, she nervously shook his hand and said that would have written the script herself but she just “Had no darned idea how to do it.” She had laughed a little with a Southern twang to it.
Her name was Hermione, she was six years younger than Larry and had bright, red hair. Larry had thought her novel was certainly an interesting one, but he’d planned to take a different direction with it, so he thought this would pose a problem. The first days working together was an awful experience, neither of them was sure of each other and had no idea what to do. It was on the fourth day when Larry had had enough and suggested they just go and get some lunch because he couldn’t work anymore, nervously Hermione had agreed. Because Larry distrusted the studio canteen they had driven to a little restaurant not too far away. It was over this lunch that Larry had happened to mention a play by Chekhov that was an influence to him and Hermione agreed with him. Before they knew it they had spent hours talking about books and poetry and had wasted most of the afternoon they should have spent writing. When they came into work the next day everything seemed to click, the reluctance and nerves had gone- the ice had broken, and the script was written in a short space of time. In between writing they would discuss plays and books and find they had very similar taste. Hermione asked Larry what Alice Rains was like and with a fake smile he said “Wonderful”.
One week before Alice was due to visit, Larry and Hermione kissed. They had had a few drinks to celebrate the completion of the third and final draft of their script. It had been a mutual kiss, neither dominated, neither took a back seat- it was mutual. That night Larry was so wrapped up in guilt he had forgotten to call Alice.
The next day Hermione apologized to Larry for what had happened. Larry tried to do the same but found he could not. He gave Hermione his New York address and number so that they could keep in contact. She kissed him on the check, and Larry held her for a few seconds imagining what it would be like to wake up one morning and see her face on the pillow beside him. He said nothing though.
When he got back to his hotel the receptionist said there was a call for him and it was urgent. “Larry, it’s Peter,” Said the voice on the other end of the phone, “It’s Alice- she’s had some kind of breakdown. You better come back to New York. We’re going to try and get her to hospital.”
Larry was told later on that the evening before Alice had been late coming to the theatre for the evening performance, most of the cast believed she would not turn up at all. When she did turn up she was in a red dress and spoke to no one. She went into her dressing room and locked the door. They’d waited as long as they could before the show began but there was no response, so an understudy went on instead. It was during the interval that the cast backstage heard screaming from her dressing and the sound of smashing glass. Some on from the crew broke down the door and Alice was sitting in a pool of broken glass from all the mirrors, cuts up and down her arms and across her face. She was screaming wildly. With surprising strength she had run past them all and out into the street. She had run into the road and was almost hit by a taxicab. The shows director, Peter, was an old friend of theirs, and followed her back to the apartment, he said without irony that she’d left a trail of bloody handprints on the stairwell for him too follow. He’d spent most of the night trying to get her to take some sedatives or go to the hospital, but she refused. While she was calm he had bandaged her arms but minutes later she tore them off. In the early morning when she was out of the room he called from an ambulance to pick her up. It took three ex-marines to get her into the back of the ambulance, and another 2 to hold her down on the journey to the hospital.
Larry got there the next day and she was as bad as ever. She didn’t seem to recognise him and scratched his face. He stayed in the hospital the whole time, sleeping in a visitor’s room. It was the opinions of the doctors and nurses that if she were to stay in hospital any longer she would have to be sectioned then put into a sanatorium. When she calmed down she asked sweetly for Larry to talk to her. She told him that all the doctors frightened her and that she didn’t want to stay in there anymore. Larry looked into her eyes and saw the old sparkle and charm that he knew so well. He kissed her forehead and told her they’d leave straight away. They were about to leave and she threw another fit, the doctors once again sedated her. While the doctors sedated her she threw Larry a glance that pierced him as if she was saying ‘Et tu, Brutus?’
That evening while she was calm Larry smuggled her out of the hospital and back to the apartment. And there they were. Tomorrow, he’d take her back to L.A, and hoped she’d be happier there, as she always seemed to be. She kept playing the same note on the piano- over and over. Ding. Ding. Ding.
“Larry?” She spoke softly.
“Yes?”
With eyes fixed on the piano she said, “Do you love me?”

Larry swallowed hard and looked out the window to the night sky, though it was marred by her reflection. “Yes, my darling,” He said, “Of course I do.”