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Weho Days - part 1 - A Night at The Planet by halfofone
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Page 5
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at least it'll give Alice plenty of material for her show. I didn't entirely help you because of Alice you know. I had other reasons. As I said Tina has no business to keep you from your daughter; less honourably I'll admit to wanting a little pay back for my own sake - Tina played us both last year; more importantly Bette, much as I hate to admit this, I misjudged you and wronged you and I owe you a lot more than just an apology."
Bette didn't look as though she was going to disagree with that statement. Helena sipped her martini.
"Can I ask you something Helena?"
"Of course."
"Why were you so set against me? You acted as though you wanted to ruin my life."
Helena took a deep breath before admitting "I did. I really did. I wanted to destroy you."
"Well I guess that's honest," Bette said, obviously shaken by the confession. Helena passed a hand through her dark hair as she looked into the distance past Bette.
"How did I hate thee. Let me count the ways. Do you really want me to count the ways Bette?"
"Go for it. It's always interesting to find out why someone whom I'd hardly met hated my guts enough to take everything away."
"My mother loved you."
"That's old."
"Agreed. But jealousy aside, I thought you were manipulating her, had manipulated her into giving you the Provocations exhibit. Do you remember Gina Ferrara?"
Bette inclined her head cautiously.
"Well Bette, Gina is an old friend of mine. We go way back."
"Oh."
"Let's say that Gina wasn't complimentary about your business dealings. Did you really sleep with an artist just to get her show away from Gina?"
Bette flinched and slowly chugged her drink before admitting the truth.
"Yeah I guess I did. It wasn't quite that simple - I really liked the woman. She was an amazing artist and very attractive..."
"And the next time Gina runs into you, you go behind her back and all but seduce my mother. Poor old Gina was left high and dry explaining to MOCA why their exhibition had been stolen from them."
Alice stirred from her resting place, "This is boring."
"Go back to sleep Alice," snapped Bette. Alice obliged, sinking deeper into Helena's shoulder.
"Okay Helena, I see why you might not trust me but does any of that merit actual hatred?"
Helena fiddles with the olive resting in her martini. She knows their conversation is about to get harder and meaner. She should stop but this confrontation is overdue.
"The first time we meet, you make an uninvited appointment to see me to indulge in some special pleading for your Peabody grant, though personal meetings with the Chair of the Foundation are not any part of the grant-giving procedures. You let me know that you're gay and have a partner and are about to have a child, none of which were remotely relevant to your case and as far as I was concerned, were blatant attempts at manipulating me as you had my mother."
"That wasn't my best..." Bette tried to interrupt defensively. Helena glared at her and continued fiercely.
"No your 'best' was going behind my back to my mother and trying to get her to influence the decision. For once the mad old bat supported me but that didn't change what you had tried to do. So far Bette all I could see was a scheming ruthless woman who had gained an inordinate amount of influence through back-stabbing. My opinion didn't change when I met Tina and discovered that you had been lying to me about your relationship and that you had cheated on her. On top of that you were so bumptious and possessive of Tina that I couldn't wait to knock you down."
Bette was silent though her dark eyes were angry and resentful. Helena's expression softened.
"However the real reason I hated you Bette had nothing to do with you at all."
Bette looked at her blankly.
"Your real offence was that I thought you were like Winnie." Helena's voice was soft and reluctant as she came to the climax of her explanation. "Winnie is the most accomplished and manipulative, scheming bitch I have ever had the misfortune to encounter let alone have children with. She turned undermining me into an art form and at the point in time that I first met you, she was using everything in her considerable arsenal to separate me permanently from my children. She even went to see you didn't she? I had her followed twenty-four hours a day in case she tried to leave the country with the children and she approached almost everyone I knew or worked with, including my mother to see if she could employ them against me in the custody case."
Bette looked totally disbelieving. Her voice rose. "You brought me down as a way of getting even with Winnie? You have to be kidding me."
Helena kept her chin up though it was hard in the face of Bette's righteous fury. "I couldn't take revenge on Winnie because of Wilson and Jun Ying but I could give you crap and feel good about it because of what I thought you had done to Tina, Gina and my mother."
"Jesus."
"I can't change what I did Bette but I swear that I will do my best to assist you adopting Angelica or even getting Tina back if you ever decide that's what you want."
Bette was controlling herself with some difficulty. She gripped the sides of the chair, afraid of the damage she might inflict on the woman who had done so much to hurt her.
"Why, since you despise me so much, would you now want to help me at all. Why not just finish the fucking job?" she enquired in a voice dripping venom.
"Because I was wrong about you. What I said to Tina yesterday was true - you do things out of passion not calculation. You are sometimes unthinking and go after what you want without considering consequences but you're not deliberately manipulative and eventually I realised that your situation with Tina was not uncomplicated or one-sided. Tina is the subtle one."
"So now you feel sorry for me because I am a wrong-headed bull in a china shop," Bette ground out through gritted teeth. She was still keeping a firm grip on her chair as if afraid that if she let go she would go into orbit. Which may have been a true risk at least metaphorically speaking.
Helena shook her head and smiled tentatively, "I came to realise why your friends love you and even why my mother loves you."
"Strangely Helena I don't give a shit what you think of me."
The Briton looked away discouraged. "I know. Why should you. But I am going to tell you anyway because I may never get up the courage again. The funny thing is everyone assumes that because I went after Tina, she was 'my type' - actually she was a break from the norm."
"Actually I thought it was because you had a fetish for pregnant women."
Helena's lips twitched. "Maybe...I do find pregnant women very attractive. My fetishes aside, Dylan Moreland, as painfully bad as that turned out, was definitely 'my type' - passionate, carelessly brave, unorthodox, maybe a little buccaneering.
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