"Of course," he said. He took a deep breath. "The brain already shows signs of damage in certain nerve areas.
It is this damage that makes it difficult for her to remember things – simple, everyday things like names, places, time.
Everything in her memory is present, there is no past, perhaps no today. It is an unconscious effort to recall these little things that causes the strain and brings on the headache."
"But isn't that a good sign?" she asked hopefully. "This is the first time in almost a week that she seems partly normal."
"I know how concerned you are," he said cautiously. "And I don't want to appear unduly pessimistic, but the human mechanism is a peculiar machine.
It is a tribute to her physical stamina that she's holding up as well as she is. She's going through recurrent waves of extremely high fever, a fever that destroys everything in its path.
It's almost a miracle that when it abates slightly, even for a moment, as it just has, she can return to a semblance of lucidity."
"You mean she's slipping back into delirium?"
"I mean that her temperature is beginning to climb again," he answered.
Ilene got to her feet quickly and crossed to the door.
"Do you think I can speak to her again before she slips back?"
"I'm sorry," he said, shaking his head. He got to his feet. "Her temperature began to rise about twenty minutes after you left the room. I put her in sedation to ease the pain."
She stared at the doctor. "Oh, my God!" she said in a low voice. "How long, doctor? How long must she suffer like this?"
"I don't know," he said slowly. He took her arm. "Why don't you let me drive you home?
There's nothing you can do tonight, believe me.
She's asleep."
"I’d- I'd like to look in on her just for a moment," she said hesitantly.
"It's all right, but let me warn you. Do not be upset by her appearance.
We had to cut off most of her hair to make the electroencephalogram."
Ilene closed the door of her office and crossed to her desk. There were some preliminary sketches of the costumes for a new picture waiting for her approval.
She flicked on the light and walked over to the built-in bar.
She took down a bottle of Scotch and filled a glass with ice cubes. Covering the ice with the whisky, she went back to her desk, sat down and picked up the sketches. She sipped at the drink as she studied them.
She pressed a button in the arm of her chair and an overhead spotlight set in the ceiling shone down onto the drawings.
She turned her chair toward the pedestal on her left, trying to imagine the dress on the model.
But her eyes kept misting over with tears.
The sketches seemed to disappear and all she could see was Rina standing there on the pedestal, the white light shining down on her long blond hair – the white-blond hair that still hung in angry clinging tufts to the pillow under her shorn head.
"Why did you have to do it, God?" she cried aloud angrily at the ceiling. "Why do you always have to destroy the beautiful things? Isn't there enough ugliness in the world?"
The tears kept blurring in her eyes, but through them, she could still see Rina as she stood on the pedestal for the first time, the white silk shimmering down over her body.
It wasn't long ago. Five years. And the white silk was for a wedding gown.
It was just before Rina's marriage to Nevada Smith.
15.
It started out as a quiet wedding but it turned into a circus, the biggest publicity stunt ever to come out of Hollywood.
And all because David Woolf had finally made it into the bed of the redheaded extra who had a bit-role in The Renegade.
Though he was a junior publicist, just one step above the lowest clerk in the department, and made only thirty-five a week, David was a very big man with the girls.
This could be explained in one word. Nepotism. Bernie Norman was his uncle.
Not that it did him much good. But the girls didn't know that.
How could they know that Norman could scarcely stand the sight of his sister's son and had only given him the job to shut her up?
Now, in order to keep his nephew from annoying him, he had given his three secretaries orders to bar David from his office, no matter what the emergency. This annoyed David, but right now it was far from his mind. He was twenty-three and there were more important considerations at hand. What a difference between the broads out here and those back home. He thought of the usherettes back at the Bijou Theater in New York, the frightened little Italian girls and the big brassy Irish, and the quickies that took place in the deserted second balcony or out on the empty stage in back of the big screen while the picture unfurled itself over their nervous heads. Even back there, Bernie Norman's name had been a help to him. Why else would they take an eighteen-year-old kid off a junk wagon and make him an assistant manager?
The girl was talking.
At first David didn't hear her.
"What did you say?" he asked.
"I’d like to go to the Nevada Smith wedding." Her position may have been oblique but her approach wasn't. He recognized it.
"It's going to be a small affair," he said.
Her voice was clearer now as she looked up at him.
"There'll still be a lot of important people there who'd never see me any other way."
"I’ll see what I can do," he said.
It was a little while later, when he was making his third greedy attempt to grab the brass ring, that the idea came to him. "Yeow!" he yelled suddenly as the far-reaching implications unfurled in his mind.
Startled, the girl looked up at him and saw a blindly rapt expression on his face. "Take it easy, honey. You'll wake the neighbors," she whispered softly, thinking he had reached his climax.
And, in a manner of speaking, he had.
Bernie Norman prided himself on being the first executive in the studio each day.