Burning Tides: A Narrative Fiction

“Riley Camille, this is your mother. Don't hang up.”

I had just tossed the last of the downed branches onto the burn pile, taking advantage of the break in the weather to do a little clean up before the next storm. The dead pine burned hot and smokeless, and soon would be a glowing mound of ash that tonight's predicted rain would douse.

“What can I do for you, Greer?” I said, sinking onto the upended fir round I used as a stool, and cursing myself for not checking the caller ID.

“It is I who am doing something for you.” She was using the more-sophisticated-than-thou elocution she'd acquired as a starlet at Olympus Pictures, though six decades and a pack-a-day Benson and Hedges habit had blunted its steely edge. “But before we get to that, how are things in the countryside, or wherever it is you live? Have you remarried?”

As if after Danny I would ever put myself in that position again.

“No, not married,” I said. I heard a lighter's scritch and a moment later she exhaled a lungful of smoke. Eight hundred miles between us and I automatically held my breath to avoid inhaling it.

“Well, I suppose you shouldn't give up hope. I'd advise you to ply your charms, but as Ned would say, it's like asking a plow horse to run at Santa Anita.”

Harlan “Ned” Nedlin was a former second-rate talent agent who had success in the late-Seventies launching the movie careers of stand-up comics who then promptly traded up to better agents. He became a velour track-suited fixture in my life when I was a sixteen year old box-girl at Gelson's Market. One afternoon, after I loaded his bag of grapefruit and vodka into the trunk of his Jaguar, Ned offered me five hundred bucks to meet him after work at the Del Capri Motel. Upon confiding the affront to my mother, she defended my virtue by making Ned her third husband.

“People say it's uncanny how much I resemble you,” I said.

“It's not the horse's conformation that wins the race. It's the

spirit.”

“Thanks for the tip. If that's all...” I stood to walk back to the house.

“The reason for my call is,” she paused for a long drag, “after so many years, I've decided to acquiesce to the pleas of my fans—who never forgave me for abandoning my career to devote myself to raising a family—and write my memoirs.”

I sat back down. Career? Greer Greene—the name she adopted when the studio reckoned Clara Pugh wouldn't convey the gravitas demanded by her debut as the dying teen in Dark Mercy—appeared in six forgotten films in the late Fifties and a 1971 Swedish noir-ish fantasy critics dismissed as “derivative.” Calling that a career was like calling a handful of Cheetos and a cough drop a feast. To hear Greer tell it, her cameo in Lies and Lamentations was Hollywood's way of repaying Sweden for giving us Garbo and Bergman.

“And how this benefits you,” she continued, “is that I'll have a nice little nest egg to leave you. Not for a long time, of course, so don't get your greedy little nose twitching.”

My hand reflexively went to my face, my forefinger tracing the too-perfect plane of my too-small nose. That was another benefit Greer bestowed, on my fifteenth birthday, when she was angling for Dr. Steiner to divorce his wife and marry her. She convinced my father that if he didn't fork over the six thousand bucks, I'd end up a hopeless outcast. I glanced up and down the river. No other houses in sight. So much for an ounce of prevention.

“And don't worry,” she assured me. “I'll paint you in a favorable light. I won't mention, well, you know.”

So this was the real reason for the call, to gloat that she'd written my part as the defective, difficult child the audience wishes would get hit by a streetcar to relieve the long-suffering mother's unfair burden. Cue Joan Crawford's moist eyes and squared shoulders.

“Ned thinks we should publish it ourselves, to realize the largest return. Since you will benefit the most—later on, of course—we thought it would be remiss if we didn't let you in on the ground floor. There will be a movie, too, of course, and...”

Of course. I felt like I was just given the opportunity to buy the bullet for the rifle aimed at my head. “You spent the life insurance,” I said, her motive suddenly clear. When my half-brother Gabe died five years ago, he left Greer two million in insurance. He also left me a tidy sum which I invested and planned to used judiciously over the next few decades to maintain my life beside the river.

“What about the house?” I asked. “That's got to be worth over a million.” Hanging on the fringe of Beverly Hills, the three-bedroom bungalow with a concrete backyard you could spit across was aggrandized by its zip code. “You could sell it.”

Suddenly, Greer's Connecticut finishing school diction flew southwest to Burbank High. “And do what, move to some shitty little condo in Arizona? Ned would never.”

“Good luck with your book, then.”

“I should've known not to expect anything from you. You've always been an ungrateful little—”

I turned off the phone and slipped it into my back pocket, taking a last look at the fire to make sure all the dead wood was consumed. I headed back up the path to the house, dusting white flecks of ash off my flannel shirt.