Almost Paradise Read online

  Susan Isaacs

  Almost Paradise

  TO MY CHILDREN

  ANDREW AND BETSY ABRAMOWITZ

  WITH ALL MY LOVE

  Contents

  Prologue

  Jane Cobleigh was on a British Airways Concorde, flying faster…

  Book One

  Jane

  1

  Jane Cobleigh’s mother would have loved the chance to talk…

  2

  Richard thought the woman sitting across from him was the…

  3

  Richard Heissenhuber wasn’t a merry widower. Not that he moaned…

  4

  The Heissenhubers’ house, 7510 Ross Avenue had a lawn but…

  Book Two

  Nicholas

  5

  Despite his genteel name, Nicholas Cobleigh’s grandfather, Henry Underwood Cobleigh…

  6

  The Tuttles were not as rich as the Rockefellers or…

  7

  Tall like her father with kinky orange-red Tuttle hair and…

  8

  “All right, damn it.” And then, with a sigh so…

  9

  Five-year-old Nicholas sat beside three-year-old Thomas in a wing chair…

  10

  In the years after his smashup in soccer, Nicholas broke…

  Book Three

  Jane & Nicholas

  11

  Jane Heissenhuber and Nicholas Cobleigh first noticed each other in…

  12

  “Look, I can see where you’d want to—” James’s voice…

  13

  Garlic from the hot dogs wafted through the air to…

  14

  The only chairs in their apartment were the four ladder-back…

  15

  Cradling her in his arms, Nicholas brought his daughter close…

  16

  Whenever she came to visit, and she came at least…

  17

  Maybe it had something to do with Sally’s sudden death.

  18

  Nearly everyone in California had asked him, “Do you play…

  19

  “Listen, Nicky,” Murray King said. “It’s been—what?—eight, nine months since…

  20

  “It must feel a little like being the pope,” Jane…

  21

  “You always do this,” Jane said, putting the old gym…

  22

  Nicholas had come home the night before with two more…

  23

  Ellie Matteo looked as though she belonged in a spaghetti-sauce…

  24

  “Would you be more comfortable over there?” Judson Fullerton asked.

  25

  Judson Fullerton sat in a pink padded chair that looked…

  26

  Nicholas had seen the girl before at New York University.

  27

  Sexual heat takes six months to dissipate. At least that’s…

  28

  Nicholas had never been sensitive to noise. He had grown…

  29

  Cecily had asked the question a month before. Why hasn’t…

  30

  Laurel Blake, playing his wife, Matilda, was saying, “What is…

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Susan Isaacs

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Jane Cobleigh was on a British Airways Concorde, flying faster than sound to try and reclaim her husband. At the end of the flight she managed to look out of her window. Gray London was opalescent under the haze of a summer heat wave.

  She got to her hotel about the time Nicholas returned to his townhouse from the studio. “Good evening.” A desk clerk in formal dress greeted her. He must be so hot; his neck swelled red over his tight wing collar.

  Jane swallowed her instinctive Ohio hi. “Good evening,” she said.

  “So good to have you with us, Mrs. Cobleigh.” He clearly relished pronouncing the celebrated name. His voice was fruity and so consummately English that she half expected him to pour forth with a sonnet: When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,/And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field…

  Instead of reciting Shakespeare, the clerk said, “Will you be paying by check or credit card?”

  “Credit card,” she said.

  “Excellent,” he replied.

  What if she’d said check instead?

  His entire face was flushed, as if trying to keep up with his cherry of a nose. The lobby of the hotel was too much in the grand style to be degraded by anything as crassly mechanical as air conditioning. The clerk, appropriately dressed for all the marble and gilt, wore a starched shirt, heavy waistcoat, and wool cutaway. Soon he might swoon from the heat. She probably would. But no, he merely moved slowly, presenting her key to the bellman as if it were part of some ceremony as old as the Magna Carta.

  At last in her cool room, she must have overtipped the bellman, because he bowed as if she had come to England to establish her rightful claim to the throne. She couldn’t remember what five pounds was worth; she was too tired to think.

  After her bath, she admitted it wasn’t only fatigue. It was nerves. The estranged wife of the world’s most famous actor should not be popping up in London. Hi! My affair is over. It never really meant anything. How about yours? Ready to ditch her? What does a forty-year-old man need a twenty-four-year-old for anyway—someone people describe as having shining, cascading red hair and a figure like a very expensive, extremely delicate porcelain doll?

  Jane, he’d begin. He’d be so sorry for her.

  But all your phone calls. You sounded as if—I was positive—

  Jane, I’m sorry. I thought it would make it easier for the girls if you and I had a more cordial relationship. I was just trying to be—well, friendly. I’m truly sorry you misinterpreted the calls. You see, I love Pamela. I told you that two years ago—

  Nerves. Not nerves. Terror. Humiliation. Here she was, ready to make a complete transatlantic ass of herself. What could she say? Oh, hi. Just hopped a plane to London even though I’ve never flown before in my whole life and thought I’d drop in and see how you were doing.

  What if Pamela was with him? Everyone who saw them together said she was always holding on to him. Clutching his hand. Resting her head against his chest. She must be a midget, Jane thought. No. Petite, adorable. I’ll look like King Kong next to her.

  What would she say? She had nothing rehearsed. Nick, we have to talk. Nick, I still love you. I love you so much, you have no idea—

  He had loved her too. After their marriage, his parents had cut off the flow of money Nicholas had always assumed was unstoppable; the elder Cobleighs were stunned and hurt that he was giving up law school to be an actor. Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, Nicholas was no longer floating in the warm sea of upper-class security.

  Jane had caught him one morning, mesmerized by the crazed skittering of the cockroaches across the drainboard of the sink in the kitchen of their cold-water flat on West Forty-sixth Street. His disgust, his humiliation even, tore at her. Everything had always been so nice for Nicholas until she had seduced him into acting, conned him into poverty.

  She’d come up to him and said, Nick, listen. I’m sorry. I’m sorry it’s crummy and we’re so broke and—

  She’d stopped short. Where he came from, self-pity was probably viewed as a lower-class indulgence, and if she kept on he’d realize what a mistake he’d made. Whoops! he’d say and fly out the door, run east as fast as he could, back to Park Avenue. But he’d put his arm around her and said, Take it easy. We’ll survive. Just look at us. We could be a play in summer stock—a young coup
le, madly in love, poor as church mice. Have you ever heard a romance like that which doesn’t have a happy ending? Come on, smile. Come on, before I get a cockroach bite standing here in bare feet and we end up with a lousy melodrama—me dying from bubonic plague and you huddling in your shawl. She’d smiled. Good, he’d said. Now say you love me. I love you, Nick.

  I love you, Nick. That’s what she’d say. Then it would all be up to him.

  No matter what happens between them, a man cannot be married to a woman for nineteen years and not care about her. A man cannot be married to a woman for all that time and not remember they were once in love.

  So it was not surprising that about the time Jane finally fell asleep in her London hotel, Nicholas Cobleigh, less than a mile away, dreamed about her. He wakened just before dawn in a too-elegant canopied bed in a too-chichi rented townhouse with Jane on his mind. The old Jane. He couldn’t recall most of the dream, only a moment that was actually a sliver of memory: Jane having dinner with his family for the first time.

  It was right after commencement exercises at Brown, and there was Jane—dark-skinned, with that heavy black braid hanging to her waist—in the Falstaff Room of the Sheraton-Biltmore in Providence. In the midst of eight fair-skinned, bright-haired, well-tailored Cobleighs, she looked like an immigrant. Her green shirtwaist dress—a little too tight across the bust—glared like a go light among the beige silks and tan tweeds. Jane was gazing down at the artichoke his father had ordered for her. She looked miserable, so intimidated by the strangeness of it she could not lift her fork.

  Nicholas turned over his pillow to the cool side. It wasn’t part of the dream, but he recalled how Jane had kept her head down and then finally let her eyes rove around the Cobleighs, searching for clues on how to approach the thing on her plate. She pulled at a leaf. The artichoke slid up in its oily vinaigrette and would have flown into her lap had she not managed to grab it with her left hand.

  Nicholas remembered how he’d waited then for her to make one of her funny, self-effacing remarks, but she kept silent, and he’d realized how cowed she was by what she saw as eight sophisticated New Yorkers. She was sitting between his father and his brother Tom, so he couldn’t reach for her hand and squeeze it, let her know just how fine she was doing.

  Too bad her eyes had been lowered. They were beautiful. He’d wanted his family to admire them. Deep blue and velvet, like pansies. Much nicer than his eyes, despite all the fuss.

  That day, his makeup man had said, “Oh, dear, Mr. Cobleigh, slightly bloodshot.” Nicholas sighed, but he understood. William the Conqueror was a thirty-five-million-dollar film riding on certain assets, among them Nicholas Cobleigh’s world-renowned blue-green eyes.

  His eyes would be bloodshot again. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Jane kept intruding. If he didn’t dream of her, he awakened in the middle of the night and there she was anyway, stretching out in his mind—big, long-limbed—taking over.

  Turning the pillow to its cool side did not banish her. Nor could deep, deliberate breathing. Not even moving toward the center of the bed helped. He tried it anyway, pressing up against Pamela’s back, reaching his arm around her and cupping her tiny breast.

  Nicholas eased away, out of the bed, tiptoed downstairs to the library, and lifted the telephone receiver.

  He had no idea why he kept phoning Jane or what he would say this time. It embarrassed him, calling her three or four nights a week, making up excuses about the girls. Could you send me a copy of Vicky’s final grades? Did you speak to the camp doctor about Liz’s ear infection? Jane would know it was almost dawn in London.

  One night he’d decided to say something, to see how she would react. He’d thought he’d say, I think it’s about time we spoke to the lawyers. I can’t keep Pamela waiting forever. He’d see. If Jane sounded indifferent, he might just go through with it. But then when he’d heard her familiar hello—still a trace of that drawn-out, funny-sounding Cincinnati o—his throat had tightened and all he could say was, The accountant said you still didn’t send him your W-2. We only have an extension until the middle of this month. She’d said, Okay, I’ll look for it. Hey, by the way, how is William going? He’d told her for nearly an hour.

  He dialed the apartment in New York and the house in Connecticut, waking the housekeepers in both places. Mrs. Cobleigh wasn’t expected in. Mrs. Cobleigh had gone on vacation. A message, sir? No, he’d told both housekeepers, no message. I’ll speak to her some other time.

  He hung up the phone and went upstairs, back to bed. Pamela curled up against him, tendrils of her hair invading his mouth and nose. Nicholas brushed them away, then closed his eyes.

  He wondered where Jane had gone. He thought about the dream, about the bright green dress that pulled too tight. Then he began to imagine what it would be like to see her again.

  Their meeting didn’t happen the way either of them planned it. What happened was, sometime around noon the next day, an unspeakably hot July day in 1980, a day when three extras fainted inside their armor, when the makeup department ran out of Alabastar #6 body makeup because the actors were sweating it off every ten minutes, a day when—it being England—the commissary used its last ice cube at ten thirty, Jane Heissenhuber Cobleigh, dressed in cool cream linen, stepped out of a gray Daimler limousine across from Blackheath Studios calling Nick! Nick! to the occupant of another limousine leaving the studio, ran into oncoming traffic, and was hit by a blue MG driven by a drummer for an obscure rock group who—for the first time in three weeks—was clean, straight, and sober.

  What happened might have occurred by cosmic design or by chance. Neither Nicholas nor Jane was the sort to have spent much time debating which it was. Things happened. So much had happened in their own lives they had little faith that the future would be predictable and neat.

  But they would never have expected anything like this. Who would?

  No character in this novel represents or is based on an actual person. All events and personalities are imaginary.

  BOOK ONE

  JANE

  1

  We’ve just received a dispatch from Reuters saying Jane Cobleigh was hit by a car while crossing a street just outside London. Her husband, famed actor Nicholas Cobleigh, has refused to talk with reporters and is…

  —Excerpt from NBC News Update

  Jane Cobleigh’s mother would have loved the chance to talk to reporters. She would have opened her blouse an extra two buttons’ worth, slid a wet tongue over her lips, and ambled out and murmured “Hi, boys.” Of course, that would have been during her show business days, before she became a housewife, mother, churchgoer, canner of vegetables. Before she became Mrs. Richard Heissenhuber.

  In her show business days she was Sally Tompkins, chorus girl. She was an actress, too. In 1926, in the comedy skit Belle of Broadway, she had six lines that ended with “Well, Mr. Prescott, you can take that and that,” with each that swinging her chest from one side to the other. Then she would stomp off, stage left, and there would always be whistles and applause. The director, Mr. Norton, observed she had great comic talent, although he’d be the first to recognize her range was probably broader. But, he whispered later, if you got a pair of jugs like this, no one’s gonna let you play Lady Macbeth. And a few nights after that he told her that Sally Tompkins wasn’t a good name for her type. It was too girl-next-door and she was definitely an exotic. Since she was half Spanish—right?—why didn’t she use something like Lola Torrez or—let’s see, one of those one-name names, Bonita or Caramba. But she told him, what could she do? Sally Tompkins was her real name.

  It wasn’t. Her real name was Sarah Taubman, and she was born a bastard in 1906 on the Lower East Side of New York.

  Her mother, Jane’s grandmother, Rivka Taubman, was a fat, dreamy girl of fourteen, so nearsighted she could neither baste nor finish the women’s shirtwaists her parents worked on; she was only able to sew buttons. She would hold the fabric close to her eyes and stitch on button after button.
What looked like freckles on her nose were tiny scabs where the needle pricked.

  One April night when the wet winter chill finally left the air and it was too dark to sew, Rivka left the two-room apartment and clomped down five flights of stairs. She sat on the stoop, breathing clean spring air that was free of the indoor smell of boiled onions, smiling a gentle smile. Her pale round face was haloed by curly black hair. And who should come along and sit next to her but a boy from around the corner, a snappy dresser, Yussel—Joseph—Weinberg. He was sixteen years old and tall like a regular American, a baseball player or policeman. He put his face up to hers, and she could see he was darkly handsome.

  “Hello, there, good-looking,” he said. His English was perfect. So they talked a little and she saw him a couple of days after that and then a few times more. One evening he said “Come with me” and she did. They went into the hall of the building next door. He led her behind the stairs. She said “I can’t see,” and he told her to shush. Then he kissed her, and before she could say no he was touching her all over. She knew it wasn’t such a good idea, but he got angry when she pushed his hand away. So she let him. When she got back upstairs her mother yelled because she’d forgotten to bring the piece-work to Mr. Marcus. “Stupid!” her mother screamed. “Blind and stupid!” At thirty-four, her mother had no teeth.

  So she would meet Yussel in the dank shadows behind the stairs where sometimes people threw their garbage, and she prayed the rats wouldn’t climb up her skirt. They didn’t; Yussel did. He lifted her skirt and pulled down her drawers and stuck it into her every single night. Of course, she became pregnant.