Page 47 of The Manor of Dreams

“Reid,” Lucille said, her voice cracking in relief. “Can we meet up?” She shut her eyes. “I want to talk to you.”

RENNIEreturned to her room after scrounging up a dinner of leftovers from the fridge, accompanied by a few glasses of wine and somedisapproving looks from Lucille. She felt sufficiently buzzed and sleepy now.

She opened the door and the first thing she saw across the room was the Oscar trophy.

Rennie scrambled for the light switch. Hadn’t she buried it back in the bottom of her mother’s vanity drawer? But even with the lights on, the trophy was still there.

Could she have some strange gap in her memory? Had she blacked out? Forgot that she carried it back? God, was she drinkingthatmuch?

Rennie shuffled forward uncertainly. She reached out her fingertips and brushed the surface. Then she grasped the trophy in her hand.

This had happened once before. Nearly forty years ago, the night she saw the broadcast of her mother at the Academy Awards. Rennie had sat so close to the television, nose almost pressed to the glass, that Edith later joked that it was like Rennie was about to jump into the TV itself. She didn’t tell anyone what had happened earlier that day. That she had sat in front of the mirror at Ma’s vanity, and for a moment, seen an older version of herself, all done up with makeup, clutching an award in her hands. That night she’d gone to bed vibrating with excitement after seeing her mother win the Oscar on live television. The next morning she had woken up to the same award perched on her nightstand. Her fate was there, laid out in front of her, sure as the turn of time.

It had been the beginning of her dream of becoming an actress. A dream that buoyed her through boarding school and all the way to New York City. She persisted through early morning wake-up calls and long audition lines, rehearsing until her voice went hoarse, hoping for it all to happen in due time. Rennie imagined her mother talking to her, hearing her voice as if she were right in front of her in the dressing room, fixing her costume before the community play.Chin up. Keep that smile. Look at a place beyond the crowd. I made you beautiful,??.Go make me proud.She wanted to make it just like Ma had.

But somewhere along the way her dream sharpened into desperation. She remembered New Year’s Eve in 1998, on the cusp of the new millennium. Twenty-two-year-old Rennie had wandered home in thesnow to her windowless apartment in the East Village with hallways that smelled like oil and old paint. She was alone and yet she felt held by this wondrous city and carried by its incandescent vitality. She remembered how anxiously she had waited for that call from her agent; oh, howbadlyshe wanted to hear that she’d beat out the other two girls in the final auditions. She would have done anything to be able to call her mother and tell her she’d gotten the Scorsese role.

She had sat on the floor of that apartment, eating deli chicken in measured mouthfuls to stay slim in the heavy sequined dress she was planning on wearing to her friend’s party later that night. She thought about her family. Lucille was probably being boring and pre-studying for her next semester law classes out in California, in an apartment strung up with Christmas lights that she shared with her boyfriend, Daniel. Rennie wondered if she would ever find someone.

She spent that evening watching the landline for a call that never came. In another world, that moment could have been the start of it all.

Now Rennie sat on her childhood bed in her childhood bedroom, cradling her mother’s trophy in her hands.

The lights flickered.

“You always wanted this, didn’t you? Now it’s yours.”

Rennie’s head snapped up. In the reflection in the window, her mother stood behind her, her eyes drilling into Rennie’s.

The trophy fell to the floor. Rennie hunched over, squeezing her eyes shut.

She’s not there. It’s in your head. It’s all in your head, don’t you see?

Rennie stayed trembling on the floor, trying to focus on her breath, her pulse thumping in her ears. The room stayed quiet. She looked up. She was alone. But the room was dark.

Rennie ran to the light switch and flipped it. Nothing. The lights must have short-circuited again. She brushed dust and dirt off the light switch and walked back to her bed in a daze and sank into it. The Oscar was still on the floor.

Rennie felt a crushing ache in her chest and furiously swiped the tears from her eyes. She wanted to stomp the trophy and smash itagainst the walls. Instead, she picked it up and righted it on her nightstand. She was drunk and useless.

Even now, Rennie could recall walking into the cold that New Year’s Eve night, her cheeks hot, her agent’s words and the buzz of static ringing in her ears:Martin said you were luminous. He really did. You were second in line for the part.She could remember ducking inside that crowded dive bar on Second Ave and feeling the rush of being surrounded by strangers. She’d meant to go to her friend’s party, but ended up staying at that bar all night. She’d tipped back drinks and kissed someone forgettable, and the sting of the rejection had dulled. But this would all be redeemed in time, wouldn’t it? The city hurtled into a new year and Rennie made a promise to herself. The next time she had good news, she would call her mother.

She would call everyone.

seventeen

MARCH 1986

VIVIANwore a Valentino dress of sweeping red silk and organza for the Academy Awards. Richard loved it. He always said that red was her color, and Vivian always teased him that it was just because she was wearing red the first time they met. He leaned in and told her that the moment he had seen her in that red dress, he had known he wanted her to be his. Vivian loved it when he said that. She let herself imagine him slipping the dress off her later.

Red was the color of luck. She was sure luck would grace them tonight. Richard was nominated for Best Actor, she for Best Supporting Actress. With his handsome aquiline features and classical drama training, Richard had been a perfect English prince, summoning every bit of his Shakespearean upbringing for his thunderous monologues. Vivian had poured herself into the role of Jia-Yee inFortune’s Eye. She didn’t just memorize her lines; she plunged into the mind of a desperate woman fending for herself in the Wild West with a keen, vicious will to survive. She’d spent grueling hours training in the searing, late-summer heat, her hands caked with dust, her mouth dry, her feet blistering and sweating in her boots. She still had a faint scar of a large scrape on her side from one of her stunts where she’d landed wrong. But she’d loved it. For the first time she had a significant speaking role. She did choreographed fight scenes. She even cried on-screen. Sometimes, late at night on set, she’d lean against the open door of her trailer and smoke a cigarette. Looking up at the sweep of stars above, she would feel, in her weariness, that she hadbecomeJia-Yee that day. This was the acting she was meant to do.

That her husband would win was all but assured. But Vivian alone believed they would both be walking out with trophies in their hands.

She had seen a vision in her vanity mirror a year after they’d moved into the house. It didn’t matter if it was a hallucination or a trick of the eyes. After a long day of auditions, she had sat down one night to take off her makeup and her reflection had changed. The woman in the mirror wasn’t tired and haggard. Her skin was smooth. Her shoulders were bare and pale in the beam of spotlights. She was wearing a red dress and pearl drop earrings.

And her hands clutched a gold trophy.

Vivian had stood suddenly, knocking into her vanity and rattling the perfume bottles, and then she sat down again, hard. When she lifted her eyes to the mirror, it was her again, in the bathrobe. Makeup smeared around her eyes.

---