Free Three Balconies by Bruce Jay Friedman Page B

course, hold on to the fun. They had been dining at a four-star restaurant with Hatcher’s fourth wife, a lovely woman named Hillary who had to be some three decades or more younger than the sixtyish film star. It was only when Hatcher had pushed aside the crisis that Jack felt able to take his first deep, satisfied breath. The days that followed were cozy and peaceful – cool, off-season nights, light work, ripe local wines, the three of them taking trips to inspect the seaside house that Hatcher was having built in a nearby village. Portuguese construction men with fat hands lovingly shaped the new beams.
    All of this pleasure in spite of the fact that their group was off-balance. Jack was alone. They had each other. Hatcher’s wife had a perfect face and wide, astonished eyes. It was as if amazing stories were continually being whispered in her ear. Hillary drove them about in a Ferrari at hair-raising speeds. Jack assumed she was a good driver, although her success depended upon everyone else, pedestrians and other drivers, playing their parts to perfection. She had done a few small roles in films, her specialty being young girls bewildered by first love. But she did not have the usual starlet background. Her father had been a naturalist of some prominence and her mother, a novelist, had once been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
    There was an instant connection between Hillary and Jack, but he chose, if not to ignore it, to finesse it. At the end of the evening, when they were lightly and happily drunk on wine, the three of them would stand and hug one another, a three-way embrace. Then Jack would return to his hotel to think about Hatcher and wonder about Hillary, though not to covet her. He was alone, but he did not feel in the least bit lonely. As long as the visit did not go on and on.

    While their new house was being built, Hatcher and his wife had rented a villa some five hundred yards from Jack’s puzzle of a hotel. The actor, who had suffered a stroke, liked to sleep late and to begin work at noon. Since Jack rose early, at least in foreign countries, that left him with the morning to kill. He took fresh walks through a nearby forest area, trying to ignore the giant patrolling dogs of a breed he had never encountered, then fingered merchandise in the port area; after breakfast, he sat out on the wharf, putting his face up to the sun. Out of the corner of his eyes, he watched fishermen making operatically hostile gestures at one another – any one of which would have caused instant death in the city in which Jack had lived. But these raucous combatants were friends and generally walked off arm in arm. Promptly at noon, Jack would appear at Hatcher’s villa, generally to find that the actor had not arisen. Hillary would flash by in a robe, legs exposed, apologetically running her hands through ringlets of golden hair. Hatcher would appear soon after, also in a robe, dazed, flushed, also apologetic, and begin to imitate Frenchmen for Jack, as an offering for his being late. That was the extent of their work, Hatcher doing imitations of eccentrics he wanted to work into the movie – spinsters, mad Englishmen, adenoidal Frenchmen, doddering old white colonials. He would do them into a German-made tape recorder, one of several dozen he had placed around the house, the idea being that Jack would take the cassettes back to the States, to be referred to, while he did the work. Hatcher would simply break into these imitations, taking no time at all to prepare or to get into character. This was a phenomenon to Jack, more so than the brilliance of the imitations. Often, he wondered if Hatcher had any real character of his own, other than to be sweet and befuddled.
    One day, at noon, Jack let himself into the villa and sensed an unusual stillness in the air. Since the work was casual, you could not say that he and Hatcher were at any critical juncture in the project. They had a strong middle