27

The memorial gathering for Nancy Fishman (Kruger) and Barry Bergman was held at noon on Sunday, eight days after the crash, in the social hall of the Reform temple to which Alan Marcus and Paul Kruger belonged. It was presided over by the temple’s handsome young assistant rabbi, but it was Helena Kruger who had organized the event, in part to expiate the guilt she felt over the chain of events that she had initiated and that ended in the death of her mother and of her sometime lover. She had enlisted the participation of the rabbi, who had known neither victim and who was unmarried, by half-subtly flirting with him, with the implicit promise of more to come. She had arranged for the rental of the hall, for the catering of food, and for the printing of invitations that she had personally distributed from mailbox to mailbox. When Gina George received her invitation, she called Helena back at the number that was printed on it. Gina told her that she had known Barry for many years, but she was also her father’s friend. Helena then said that the chore she dreaded the most was asking her father to attend, and Gina volunteered to perform the chore for her. Paul Kruger subsequently called his daughter, who was at his parents’ house, and told her that of course he would be there.

Helena, on bereavement leave from college, had also taken on the role of hostess, greeting people at the door as they arrived, shaking their hand and thanking them for coming. She did this in a long navy-blue gown with a deeply plunging neckline and a slit skirt. While some people might have found this attire inappropriate for the occasion, Jenny, who had never seen Helena before, thought that it might be the daughter’s way of commemorating her mother, since the exuberant breasts and the shapely legs were just about the only features in which the blond, voluptuous Helena resembled the slim, dark-haired Nancy.

Barry’s side of the attending crowd was made up almost entirely of his actors and other studio personnel, with only a few people that Jenny didn’t know. On Nancy’s side, on the other hand, there were family, colleagues, clients, tennis partners and other friends – enough to fill the hall almost to capacity. The Marcus family, and a few other acquaintances from the country club, could be said to belong to both sides.

The rabbi’s talk was a string of platitudes, interlaced with attempts at sounding hip, but mercifully brief. He then recited a prayer in what seemed to be Hebrew (but may have been Aramaic – it sounded a lot like what Jenny had heard on the radio broadcasts of the Assyrian Church), and to which some of the people responded periodically with “Amen.” After the first two Amens Jenny knew when to expect the remaining ones and she joined in saying them. He followed that by singing another prayer in a surprisingly lovely tenor voice. Jenny wondered if he had been hired because of his voice, as had happened with a priest at her parents’ church.

Helena then went up to the podium. “Barry Bergman and my mom were people in the public eye,” she said, seeming quite composed, “but they were very private people, and if there’s anything that any of you want to say about them, please mill around and find someone you know, or someone you don’t know, and say it to one another in private. I think they would have preferred it that way. Thank you.”

Bravo Helena, Jenny thought. If that’s what it took to keep Doc quiet...

She stood up from her seat, along with everybody else, and looked around her. A short distance away she saw, for the first time in person, Gina George, wearing a simple high-necked sleeveless black dress. After saying “excuse me” a few times Jenny found herself face to face with Gina.

“Gina? I’m Jenny,” she said.

“Hi, Jenny,” Gina said and put her arms around Jenny, who reciprocated. They held the embrace for a good while, each feeling the tears on the other’s cheek.

“We’ve got quite a bit in common,” Gina said as she broke away.

“Yes,” Jenny said with a sigh, feeling no need to elaborate. As they stood face to face wordlessly, each waiting for the other to say something, a tall, big man with a big black mustache slightly tinged with gray approached them.

“You must be Gina and Jenny,” he said. “I’m Al Rosen. I’m an old, old friend of Barry’s, and I’m afraid I was the last person to see him and Nancy before the plane took off. I was supposed to join them in Mexico City two days after.”

“It’s good to meet you, Al,” said Gina, though she vaguely remembered having met him before. “Too bad it’s like this.”

“We would have met you in March, under different circumstances,” said Jenny.

“Don’t say ‘would have,’” Al Rosen said. “Barry may be... no longer with us, but that doesn’t mean his project is dead. He asked me to co-produce, and I would be honored to carry on his legacy. What do you think?”

Gina and Jenny looked at each other. It was then, in the sunlight filtered by a stained-glass window, that Jenny noticed the somewhat careworn look that Gina’s bout with breast cancer seemed to have left on her beautiful face. It was probably temporary, Jenny thought, but it gave it a kind of added maturity that befitted the part corresponding to the Marquise de Merteuil.

“I don’t know if I’m up to it,” said Gina. “I’ve been ill, you know. And now this... Besides, I have some more responsibilities now.” When Alan told Jenny, three days before, that Barry’s house was now hers, free and clear, he also told her that Barry had left the studio to Gina, and this was probably what she was referring to.

“I understand,” Al Rosen said. “What about you, Jenny?”

“I would love to do it,” said Jenny. “And I’m pretty sure Mario Farga would too.”

“Last night I talked to Carla Ortiz,” Al said. “Barry had asked me to call her.”

“Carla?” Gina asked with surprise. “How is she?”

“She’s great. When I mentioned your name to her, she gushed about how fond she was of you and how much she admired you.”

“Did you also mention Mario Farga?” Jenny asked.

“I did, but she seemed a little reserved about him. She’s quite gung-ho on the project, though.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Gina. “By the way, I know someone who would be great in the part that Barry had in mind for me. She’s a wonderful Spanish actress named Sofia Marés. She and Mario are old friends, too.”

Mario had in fact made a similar suggestion to Jenny when he called her that morning, but she chose not to mention the fact.

“Well,” said Al with a little laugh, “then we could make the movie almost all in Spanish.”

“What do you mean, ‘almost’?” Jenny objected. “Yo también hablo español.

Lo hablas muy bien,” said Al. “¿Dónde lo aprendiste?

En Fresno, en el colegio,” Jenny answered.

“But you don’t speak Spanish, do you, Gina?” Al asked. Jenny thought she detected a hint of flirtation in his voice.

“No,” Gina answered, “just a teeny-weeny smidgen of French. And when I was in Barcelona, nobody around me spoke Spanish, only Catalan.”

“I know,” said Al. “My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was Catalan, and before she died she forgot how to speak Spanish and could speak only Catalan, which nobody else in the family knew how to speak. We had to bring a nurse for her from Barcelona.”

“I want to go to Barcelona,” Jenny said suddenly. “I want to see Mario and to meet Sofia.”

“Before you go,” Gina said slyly, “ask him if a certain Maria Rosa is still in India.”

Jenny laughed. “She is,” she said. “I know all about her.”

“Good for you,” said Gina to Jenny, but as she said it she looked at Al, seemingly returning his flirtation. Jenny knew that they would be in bed together that night, maybe even that afternoon. Al looked as if he would be a good lover. Good for you, Gina, Jenny said silently. She thought it best to leave them alone. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a group of studio people, including the director who had done both Campus Capers and Moving Away. “Excuse me,” she said to Al and Gina with a smile, “but there’s Frank Martelli, and I’d like to talk to him. I’ll see you later.”

She spent about fifteen minutes talking with Frank and his group. When she tried to find Al and Gina again, they were gone.

As they were walking across the temple parking lot on the way to Gina’s car – Al had come by taxi from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had arrived the previous day – he said to her, “You know, Gina, we saw each other before, two years ago at Barry’s, but we never actually met.”

“I thought so too,” she said. “New Year’s eve, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s it. I would have liked to dance with you, but you were with Barry...”

“Yes, he and I happened to be pretty tight right around then.”

“... so I danced with Nancy instead.”

Gina understood that they had done more than dance. “Me and Barry, you and Nancy,” she said when they got to her Mercedes. “And now it’s you and me,” she added with a smile, unlocking both doors with her remote key. “Shall I take you to the Beverly Hills?” she asked when he got in.

“Yes, thank you,” he said.

“Too bad I haven’t got my bathing suit. I love the pool there.” She started the engine and began to back out.

“That shouldn’t be a problem. I’m sure you can find one in the shop. I’m in a bungalow near the pool, so you can change there.”

“I don’t think they have bathing suits in the shop there.”

“So let’s stop on Rodeo Drive, and pick up something there. I know how much you like to swim – Barry told me quite a bit about you.”

There were now on Wilshire. “Did Barry also tell you about my recent... illness?”

“Yes,” Al said, looking at her breast.

She decided to be blunt. “I haven’t had sex in seven weeks,” she said.

“I don’t foresee a problem,” he said, gently taking her right hand off the steering wheel and lightly kissing it. She pulled it away from him in order to turn left onto Rodeo Drive, but put it on his thigh after straightening out. She saw an empty parking space on the street and pulled into it with some deft one-handed steering. After stopping she slid her hand around his crotch until she felt what she wanted to feel. She then spun her wheel and pulled out of the space, heading north on Rodeo toward Sunset. “The hell with swimming,” she said.

“The hell with skiing,” said Margaret at the beginning of yet another slushy weekend in the Jura, better for swimming than for skiing, as the television meteorologist had said. She and Nigel decided to spend it, like the preceding one, in Geneva. On Sunday afternoon she had to choose between driving home so she could start painting, as was her habit, early in the morning, or staying at Nigel’s. “The hell with painting,” she said when evening came and they were standing in front of Nigel’s building. The blood-red neon sign on a shop across the street reminded her that her last period had ended a little over a week before. “Let’s go up and make a baby, darling,” she said.

Gina’s olfactory memory suddenly clicked later that afternoon. She was driving, her body sated at last, east on Sunset on her way home from the Beverly Hills Hotel. ‘They perfume the sheets here’ had been her first thought on getting into bed with Al Rosen. She had sensed something naggingly familiar about that faint, almost subliminal fragrance before it became dissolved in the chemistry generated between her and Al. Now, her experience of the hotel made her remember the Ritz in Barcelona, and then it came to her. The odor lingering on the bed had not been left there by the hotel staff but by Carla Ortiz.

The next day Al Rosen flew back to Mexico, to be Alfredo Rosen Rivera once more. Jenny never heard from him again about the Dangerous Acquaintances project. But a few years later, when she and her husband Mario Farga were established actors in Hollywood (the agency representative who had approached them in Park City did so again two months later in Los Angeles), and their friend Gina George was the head of GG Productions, a soccer teammate of Mario’s, a Spanish journalist named Pedro, told him about something he had seen in Mexico. It was a poster for a film titled Relaciones peligrosas, with a seemingly all-Mexican cast. The poster was dominated, Pedro remembered, by the seminude picture of a very pretty, obviously Mexican young actress named Carla Ortiz. But what Pedro thought would be most interesting to Mario was the director’s name, which Pedro took to be Catalan. It was Albert Bosch.

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