Sweet Revenge

few more days. We’re going to be married on Christmas. I’d love it if you could be there. But I know how you feel about the holidays. Can you have dinner with us tonight, in the village?”
    “I’d like that. He must make you happy,” she added. “You look wonderful, Marjorie.”
    “I am better.” She pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of her linen skirt. They were the one vice she still allowed herself. “Sometimes I look back and I can’t believe what I put Daddy through, what I put myself through. I weigh a hundred twenty these days.”
    “I’m happy for you.”
    “I’ve kept a picture of myself, one of the newspaper shots from when I got out of the hospital three years ago. Eighty-two pounds. I looked like a ghoul.” She crossed long, shapely legs. “It reminds me I’m lucky to be alive.”
    “I know Michael’s proud of you. The last time I saw him you were all he could talk about.”
    “I wouldn’t have made it without him—once I got it through my head he wasn’t the enemy.” She took the glass of juice and passed the waiter an American five. “You helped too. To second generation Hollywood brats.” She tapped her glass against Adrianne’s. “Your coming to the hospital to seeme that time, talking to me even when I didn’t want to listen, telling me how difficult it had been to watch your mother lose herself. Addy, I’ve never been able to tell you, really tell you what that did for me.”
    “You don’t have to. Michael was one of the few people who really cared about my mother. He wasn’t able to help her, but he tried.”
    “I always thought he was a little in love with her. With both of you. I really hated you when we were kids.” Marjorie laughed and tapped her cigarette out. “Daddy used to talk about you all the time, what a model student you were, how well-bred and polite.”
    “How revolting,” Adrianne added, and made. Marjorie laugh again.
    “So I inhaled, smoked, swallowed any drug I could get my hands on, married a creep I knew would abuse me, made a spectacle of myself in public whenever possible. In general, I did everything I could to make Daddy’s life miserable—and it nearly killed me. The anorexia was the last.”
    “The key word is last.”
    “Yes.” Marjorie smiled, the same quick, self-deprecating smile that had made her father famous. “Well, enough of ail that. Did you know Althea was here?”
    “Althea Gray? No.”
    “Yes, indeed. Right—” Marjorie scanned the crowd, then honed in. “There.”
    Deliberately, Adrianne tipped on her sunglasses before she looked. The actress was indeed present, wearing a snug tank and mini in hot pink.
    “That outfit might be suitable for her teenage daughter, if she had one.”
    “Althea always liked to show her talent,” Adrianne said.
    “Her last two movies were bombs—I mean nuclear.”
    “So I heard.” It didn’t interest her. She’d had her revenge on Althea years before. A particularly fine set of opals with diamond baguettes had translated into an anonymous contribution to the Retired Actors’ Fund.
    “She had her thighs sucked a few months ago.”
    “Meow.” But she couldn’t help taking a harder look at Althea’s legs.
    “I gave up drinking and drugs and studs, Addy, let mehave something. Oh, I heard another tidbit from tinsel town—about your mother’s former agent. Larry Curtis.”
    Adrianne’s smile froze.
    “It seems the rumors about his preference for young girls were feet. He was caught last week
auditioning
a new client. She was fifteen.”
    Nausea churned in her stomach. With deliberate care she set her drink aside. She heard her own voice, glassy, distant. “You said he was caught?”
    “In the act and by the kid’s father. The scumbag came out of it with a broken jaw. Too bad somebody didn’t tie those balls he’s so proud of around his neck, but it doesn’t look like he’ll be working again. Hey.” Alarmed, Marjorie sat up. “You’re white as a sheet.”
    She wasn’t going to remember. Adrianne swallowed, battling the hard knot in her stomach. “Too much sun.”
    “Let’s get you into the shade before this production starts. Can you stand up? I hate to use a cliché, but you look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
    “I’m fine, really.” She had to be. Larry Curtis was in the past. All of that was. She rose and walked with Marjorie to the chairs set under a bright red canopy. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
    “It promises to be quite a