Free Angel Eyes by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

carefully, "I worry sometimes that I... Well, I still sort of lose myself when Mom's around. There's so much of her-her personality, her aura, her wa, as the Japanese would say-that there often seems no space left over for me."
    Her father said, "You should try to understand your mother more. If you did, I'm sure you'd find it worth your while."
    "I'm not sure you heard what I said.'' Tori was struggling to find a basis for communicating with him, but either he was misunderstanding her or being willful. Still, she pressed on. "I often end up not knowing how I feel about her." She looked at him, at that noble, almost primitive profile. "Do you love Mom?"
    Ellis Nunn turned to his daughter. "I understand her. Tori. I think, in your mother's case, that's the same as loving her."
    "Is it?"
    "Well, you tell me, then," Ellis Nunn said testily. "How else do you love an icon? How do you bring something so monumental, so universally adored, into your reality? The answer is, you don't waste your time. Instead, you enter into its reality as best you can."
    "I don't-"
    "Look, my marriage survived where the marriages of people like DiMaggio and Arthur Miller did not. I've come to see that as accomplishment enough." He looked away toward the pool, as if he wished he were in there now. "Your mother needs to be what she has become in the same way you and I need air to breathe. Once you understand that, you understand everything."
    Tori looked up into his face. There was just enough light left so that the reflections from the pool lit up his face and she was reminded of the photos of Greg, poolside, fresh from some diving triumph, his angel eyes aglow with the victory fever. Greg. It was always Greg. Even death could not stop them all from talking about him, thinking about him, trying to live up to the shining potential of his angel eyes.
    "Spoken like a true Zen policeman," she said with all the irony she could muster.
     
    Evening approaches. Tori, hidden away from her mother, behind the massive carved oak doors to the library, is again feeling trapped in Diana's Garden. She remembers a time of adolescence. She is trapped in the big house in L.A., in the sunshine, in her sleek tanned body. She is pinned by her beauty to the imagined future, the foregone conclusion that her father wants for her, that boys her own age imagine is already hers. They are the same, these images, and they dominate her life like a nun's vows.
    She has all she wants within Diana's Garden, and increasingly she feels that there is no reason to venture outside its perfect, all-encompassing environs.
    Until, one night during a party given by her parents, she discovers how completely she has fooled herself. Just about everyone who matters in Hollywood-except enemies-has descended upon the manor house, and the rooms are full of familiar faces, screen legends, movers and shakers. There are the money men and their exquisite women, as polished as gems, seemingly pulled out of the men's pockets like an expensive watch or a roll of thousand-dollar bills.
    Gossip, which is the only approved mode of communication at affairs such as this, centers around who is sleeping with whom, and who is pregnant by whom. Gradually it dawns on Tori that these people who inhabit Hollywood like a race of gorgeous troglodytes run their private lives in sync with their professional careers. Love affairs, marriages, seduction-whatever the current voguish designation-last among these strange, alien life forms only as long as it takes to make a film. These people meet on the set, become immersed in each other in the same manner in which they become immersed in their roles, in order to differentiate reality from fantasy, however, they feel compelled to make tangible their love for one another, if not their commitment. A child follows, as surely as the night the day. But, invariably, with the advent of the baby, the love affair, marriage, seduction loses its luster. A mother is never as exciting as a