Glitter Baby (Wynette, Texas #3)(3)

When she was nine, Belinda discovered that all the bad feelings went away when she sat in the Palace Theater and pretended she was one of the dazzling goddesses who shone on the screen. Beautiful creatures with faces and bodies a hundred times bigger than life. These women were the chosen ones, and she vowed that she, too, would someday take her place among them on that same screen, that she would be magnified as they were until she never again felt invisible.

“That’ll be twenty-five cents, beautiful.” The cashier was a handsome, Chiclet-toothed blond, too obviously an unemployed actor. His gaze slid over Belinda’s figure, fashionably clad in a pencil-slim navy cotton sheath trimmed in white and cinched at the waist with a poppy-red patent leather belt. The dress reminded her of something Audrey Hepburn would wear, although Belinda thought of herself more as the Grace Kelly type. People told her she looked like Grace. She’d even had her hair cut to make the resemblance more pronounced.

The style complemented her small, fine features, meticulously enhanced with Tangee’s Red Majesty lipstick. She’d blended a few dabs of Revlon’s newest cream rouge just below her cheekbones to emphasize their contour, a trick she’d learned in a Movie Mirror article by Bud Westmore, makeup man to the stars. She kept her pale lashes touched up with dark brown mascara, which highlighted her very best feature, a pair of exceptionally startling hyacinth-blue eyes, saturated with color and innocence.

The Chiclet-toothed blond leaned over the counter. “I get off work in an hour. How about waiting around for me? Not as a Stranger’s playing down the street.”

“No, thank you.” Belinda picked up one of the Bavarian chocolate mint bars that Schwab’s kept displayed on the counter and handed over a dollar bill. They were her special treat, along with a new movie magazine, on her twice-weekly trips to the Sunset Boulevard drugstore. So far, she’d seen Rhonda Fleming at the counter buying a bottle of Lustre-Creme shampoo and Victor Mature walking out the door.

“How about this weekend?” the cashier persisted.

“I’m afraid not.” Belinda took her change and gave him a sad, regretful smile that made him feel as if she would remember him forever with faint, bittersweet regret. She liked the effect she had on men. She assumed it came from her uncommon looks, but it sprang from something quite different. Belinda made men feel stronger, more intelligent, more masculine than they were. Other women would have turned this power to their advantage, but Belinda thought too little of herself.

Her gaze fell on a young man sitting in a back booth, shoulders hunched over a book and a cup of coffee. Her heart flipped, even as she told herself she would only be disappointed again. She thought about him so much that she imagined she saw him everywhere. Once she’d followed a man for nearly a mile only to discover he had a big, ugly nose that didn’t belong on the face of her dreams.

She walked slowly toward the back booth, excitement, anticipation, and almost certain disappointment churning inside her. As he reached for a pack of Chesterfields, she saw fingernails bitten to the quick. He tapped out a cigarette. Belinda held her breath, waiting for him to look up. Everything around her faded. Everything except the man in the booth.

He turned a page of his book, the cigarette dangling unlit from the corner of his mouth, and thumbed open a match pack. She’d nearly reached the booth when he struck the match and looked up. Just like that, Belinda found herself staring through a cloud of gray smoke into the cool blue eyes of James Dean.

In that instant she was back in Indianapolis at the Palace Theater. The movie was East of Eden. She’d been sitting in the last row when this same face had exploded on the screen. With his high, intelligent forehead and restless blue eyes, he’d roared into her life larger than all the other larger-than-life faces she’d ever seen. Fireworks exploded inside her and Catherine wheels spun, and she’d felt as if all the air had been punched from her body.

Bad Boy James Dean, with the smoldering eyes and crooked grin. Bad Boy Jimmy, who snapped his fingers at the world and laughed when he told it to go to hell. From the moment she saw him on the Palace Theater screen, he meant everything to her. He was the rebel…the lure…the shining beacon…The tilt of his head and slouch of his shoulders proclaimed that a man is his own creation. She’d transformed that message within herself and walked out of the theater her own woman. A month before her high school graduation, she lost her virginity in the backseat of an Olds 88 to a boy whose sulky mouth reminded her of Jimmy’s. Afterward, she packed her suitcase, slipped out of the house, and headed for the Indianapolis bus station. By the time she reached Hollywood, she’d changed her name to Belinda and put Edna Cornelia behind her forever.

She stood in front of him, her heart thumping in a crazy dance. She wanted to be wearing her tight black pedal pushers instead of this prim, navy-blue cotton dress. She wanted dark glasses, her highest heels, her blond hair pulled back on one side with a tortoiseshell comb.

“I—I loved your movie, Jimmy.” Her voice quivered like a violin string drawn too tight. “East of Eden. I loved it.” And I love you. More than you can imagine.

The cigarette formed an exclamation point to his sulky lips. His heavy-lidded eyes squinted against the smoke. “Yeah?”

He was speaking to her! She couldn’t believe it. “I’m your biggest fan,” she stammered. “I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen East of Eden.” Jimmy, you’re everything to me! You’re all I have. “It was wonderful. You were wonderful.” She stared worshipfully at him, her hyacinth-blue eyes luminous with love and adoration.