This ghastly reverie was mercifully interrupted by the shrill buzz of my intercom. I shambled to the door and asked who it was.
“It’s me,” said Claire through the crackle of static. “Can I come up?”
I buzzed her in, relieved to have a sympathetic listener to whom I could relate the day’s tragic events. You can imagine my chagrin then when she burst melodramatically through the door, her mood apparently even fouler than my own.
“It’s over!” she declared hotly, stabbing her umbrella into the orange crate that served as a stand.
“Oh?”
“I mean it this time. He saw her again!”
“He,” I knew, referred to her boyfriend, Marco, a very hirsute ceramist Gilbert and I had nicknamed “Hairy Potter.” “Her” could have referred to either of his two former girlfriends. Since moving in with Claire he’d vowed to put them both behind him, though when he met one he tended to put her beneath him. Claire did not elaborate. She just removed her raincoat and hurled herself onto my couch, where she sat, arms crossed, awaiting compassion.
I found this quite irksome. I’d assumed that if there was any sympathy to be offered I’d be on the receiving end. To be asked, in my shattered state, to start dishing it out made me feel like a stabbing victim who’s just lurched into the emergency room, only to be tossed a pair of scrubs and told to get to work on the burn victims.
“What’s with you?” she asked, noting my tetchy expression.
“Sorry. It so happens I’ve had a pretty vile day myself.”
“Oh?” she asked.
There was a note of challenge in her voice, and, hearing it, I decided not to elaborate. A woman whose man has just done her dirty was not likely to care that I’d been seen to bad advantage by an old classmate. I could, of course, have thrown in the stuff about Milo and the necktie counter, but Claire’s a logical girl and would only have pointed out that my undistinguished midlife, however sad, was still somewhat theoretical, that her own misfortune had actually happened and that this was, perhaps, a useful distinction.
“Never mind. Scotch?”
“Please.”
I poured us both stiff shots of Teachers as Claire poured out her tale, which differed little from the others I’d heard since Marco had oiled his way into her heart. Three suspicious hang ups, questions as to recent whereabouts, inept lying, expert grilling, confession, tears, shouting, “Go back to your whore,” curtain.
“It’s really over this time,” she proclaimed. “I mean it.”
“Good.”
“And don’t roll your eyes.”
“When did I roll my eyes?”
“Just now. Inwardly. You’re enjoying this.”
“ Excuse me?”
“You never liked Marco. You’re thrilled to see your low opinion’s been borne out.”
“Thanks a lot!” I said, miffed. “You think it pleases me when Chewbacca mistreats you? You’re my friend, for Christ’s sake. This upsets me.”
A noble sentiment, if not entirely true. There is, I confess, a small mingy part of me that feels, if not quite pleased, not exactly crushed either that, when it comes to men, Claire’s instincts are even sorrier than my own. It’s not that I wish her ill. It’s just that in every other aspect of our lives she’s so annoyingly and unquestionably my superior.
She’s smarter than me. She speaks four languages to my one and I’ve stopped even trying to play chess with her, as my odds of winning are the same I’d enjoy in a Czechoslovakian spelling bee. She’s a much better person too. She volunteers, writes thank-you notes, and adheres to a code of ethics the average bishop might find uncomfortably lacking in wiggle room. Most unforgivably, she’s more talented than me. She composes marvelous music, something I can’t do at all, and, when we write plays, tosses off bons mots and plot twists with a facility that leaves me feeling both dazzled and superfluous.
So when she periodically announces that she has, owing to her woeful misjudgment, taken yet another one on the chin from Cupid, my compassion is always leavened by an agreeable dollop of condescension. How nice for a change to be the one who gets to cluck sympathetically while thinking, “Poor dear, when will she learn?”
I topped off her glass and let her vent some more. When she’d finished I described my mortifying encounter with Charlie, adding several poignant embellishments.
“How awful for you!” she gasped. “There were actual pigeon droppings on your cap?”
“I had no idea till Charlie pointed it out!”
“How utterly tactless! Almost as bad as Marco. You know what he said when he left?”
“We’re on to me now.”
“Sorry, go on.”
When I’d finished we agreed that our souls required the healing balm that could only be provided by a highly fattening meal sluiced down with a suitably excessive quantity of wine. We were donning our coats, debating the relative merits of Carmine’s fettuccine Alfredo and Szechuan West’s Double-Fried Chicken Happiness, when my phone rang. I let the machine answer and heard Gilbert’s voice bellowing cheerfully from the speaker.
“Hi, Philip, it’s me! Are you there? Pick up! That’s an order! You may not screen this call!”
Claire shot me a pleading look, but I raised two fingers promising brevity and crossed to the phone as Gilbert continued his wheedling.
“Pick up! I have news, Philip! Amazing news!”
“Hey,” I said, “are you back early?”
“No, I’m still in LA.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Never!” he said exultantly. “I never want to leave this magical place and neither will you once you’re out here.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, confused. “What’s this earth-shattering news?”
“He saw Cher at Home Depot,” said Claire.
“Tell Claire I heard that. What’s she doing there? No date tonight with Hairy Potter?”
“No, they broke up.”
“Do you mind? ” said Claire.
“About time,” said Gilbert. “The hair on those shoulders! Like epaulets!”
“Your news?” I prompted.
“I got us a job!”
So intrigued was I by the last and loveliest word of this sentence, i.e., “job,” that it took me a moment to register the more ominous one lurking dead center. How could he have gotten “us” a job when there did not, for ample reason, exist any professional entity that could be described this way?
“What do you mean, ‘us’?”
“You and me, naturally. Claire too, of course. Can’t have her back home mooning over wolf boy while we’re off conquering Tinseltown.”
“The job’s for all three of us?”
“Hang up,” said Claire, her instinct for self-preservation undulled by the scotch.
“Yes. And for big bucks too. I should think at least fifty apiece.”
“Fifty thousand each?! ” I exclaimed and even Claire’s eyes betrayed a wary glimmer of interest. “What is it, a writing job?”
“No, I got us a gig as astronauts. Of course it’s a writing job. We’re adapting a novel into a screenplay.”
“But... but how? ” I sputtered.
“Connections, baby! I’ll explain it all when I see you tomorrow. You’re booked on the two-thirty flight. American Airlines.”
“Tomorrow?!”
“First class, of course!” he assured me, as if that were the issue.
“Tomorrow?”
“Is that a problem?” he asked impatiently.
“Well, it’s pretty damned sudden! We’re supposed to just drop everything and hop on a plane?”
“What the hell’s stopping you?” he said, getting testy.
“Well,” I sniffed, “I do have a job.”
The moment I said it I realized that, while there may have been valid reasons for me to reject such an offer, my standing commitment to trudge through Manhattan delivering parcels to the contemptuous was not the most compelling I might have
offered. Gilbert concurred.
“Your JOB?” he shouted incredulously. “Your MESSENGER JOB? Are you insane?! For ten years I have listened and pretty damned patiently while you’ve bitched and moaned about your tragic career. Poor noble Philip, struggling to keep the torch of Molière aloft and no one will give him a break! Now I’m standing here handing you Success on a silver tray with tartar sauce and you’re arguing with me? I’ll only say this once—TAKE THE DAMN JOB! Pass it up and, as God is my witness, I’ll write the damn script myself, win an Oscar for it, then spend the rest of my life following you with a sharp knife and a saltshaker!!”
“All right! Calm down! Did I say we wouldn’t come? I just need to talk it over with Claire.”
“Talk all you like, just get her out here. And by the way, you’re welcome! ”
“Give me a break, okay? This is all a bit abrupt.”
“That’s how things happen out here,” he said, all cheery again. “It’s a very impulsive town. I’m fitting in beautifully. See you at LAX!”
“Don’t hang up!”
“I’m late for a date. Your tickets will be at the counter. Bobby arranged it.”
“Bobby who?” I asked, but he was gone. I replaced the receiver and turned to Claire, whose face had taken on that stern squinty look it gets whenever Gilbert descends on our playground proffering candy.
“Well! How’s that for good news? He’s found us a job!”
“I gathered.”
“Hollywood, baby!” I said in my best Sgt. Bilko voice. “Our ship has come in!”
“Have you counted the lifeboats?” she replied and exited to the hall.
I locked the door and caught up with her in my building’s cramped vestibule-cum-gentleman’s lounge. She sailed grimly into the drizzly night and I fell in beside her, wondering how on earth I could coax her onto that plane.
YOU MIGHT SUPPOSE THAT a high-paying Hollywood job would not be a difficult thing to sell to a heartsick lady playwright whose most recent offspring had expired quietly in the cradle. You would only suppose this, however, if you didn’t know Gilbert.
Claire knew Gilbert.
And even if she were willing, in the hope of financial gain, to overlook his complete lack of talent, his nonexistent scruples and altogether tenuous grasp of reality, there remained still his most unique and troubling feature, i.e., the spectacular, almost supernatural rottenness of his luck.
Gilbert’s friends and victims have long debated what lies at the root of his uncanny knack for misfortune. Some feel it’s karmic payback for misdeeds in a previous life in which he must have been, at the very least, a Cossack. Others maintain that a touchy sorceress must have been given the bum’s rush at his christening. Whatever the reason, bad luck trails Gilbert like some relentless paparazzo. It dogs his footsteps, pops up where least expected, and rains disaster upon him and any hapless confederates he’s cajoled along for the ride. Twice in the past Claire had (thanks solely to me) become embroiled in Gilbert’s affairs with results ranging from mere humiliation to mortal peril. She was not eager as such to enlist for a third tour of duty, no matter how generous the signing bonus.
I understood her apprehension, feeling more than a shiver of it myself. But, convinced that my alternative was Milo and necktie land, I’d decided to view Gilbert’s previous debacles as a mere bad-luck streak that had, after all, to end sometime.
“I can’t believe,” I said, as we settled into our favorite booth at Carmine’s, “that you’re thinking of refusing this.”
“I can’t believe you’re not.”
“C’mon! This is exactly what we need! After all we’ve been through. The timing’s perfect!”
“That,” said Claire, “is what scares me. It’s so typical of Gilbert. He always oils around with these offers just when you’re at your most vulnerable. He’s like some—”
“Friend in need?”
“Opportunistic infection. And by the way, what’s this nonsense about him passing us off as a team? You don’t find that alarming?” asked Claire, who’d sooner have collaborated with Al Qaeda.
I replied that though a creative partnership with Gilbert was unlikely to prove the maxim that many hands make light the work, his motive for proposing it was obvious. He’d clearly used his formidable powers of persuasion to talk his way into a job, then, fearing himself not up to the task, drafted us as partners. “And a lucky thing for us, considering how bad we are at selling ourselves. Anyway,” I added, playing my strongest card, “I can’t wait to see the look on Marco’s face when he hears you’re scaling the heights in Hollywood.”
I could see that Claire had not yet viewed the matter from this perspective. Her scowl softened, and a smile, fleeting but unmistakable, played across her lips. As any wronged lover knows, success is the best revenge, and nothing stokes ambition like an unworthy ex begging to be left in the dust.
“He never took your career seriously. It’s one of the things I hated most about him.”
“It really is charming how willing you are to exploit my heartbreak for your own greedy purpose.”
“Your heartbreak,” I countered, “is half the reason we should go. What better time to take a free trip to Hollywood as guests of a real live mogul! We’ll blow town, see LA. We’ll party with Gilbert and his mom—whom you adore. We’ll find out what the job is and if you don’t like it you’ll fly home. First class! At best it’s a job, at worst a vacation, so cut the Cassandra routine and eat fast ’cause we need to pack.”
This tough-love approach, abetted by wine and more catty allusions to Marco, eventually won the day. She agreed to join me so long as I understood that she was not committing to anything whatsoever.
Her subsequent references that night to our “glittering new careers” were all made in the droll manner of a governess humoring her delusional charge. But for all her glib ironies I could detect in her quick smiles and flushed cheeks the first reluctant stirrings of hope. I knew that beneath that wry, guarded exterior she burned with the girlish desire to win some small sliver of Hollywood fame, then stab her sweetie in the eye with it.
My own optimism was less guarded and soared higher as the level in the wine bottle descended. I marveled at how my fortunes had rebounded and chided myself for my earlier pessimism. How absurd that a man of my gifts and obviously shining future had allowed himself to wallow in morbid, cravat-themed fantasies.
Swell talk show story though!
MY THOUGHTS WOULD NOT return again to old Milo until a bleak and drizzly afternoon the following February.
Gilbert and I, reeling from the latest in a seemingly endless string of catastrophes, had wandered numbly into the Beverly Hills Neiman Marcus in the preposterous hope that a spot of shopping might cheer us. We discovered a bar on the top floor and agreed that a cocktail might soothe our nerves and quiet the facial tic I’d recently developed.
As I nibbled morosely on my olive, I glanced up and noticed the necktie counter, where a well-dressed man about my age was meticulously arranging the latest merchandise. How cheerful he looked. How content to spend his days among so many pleasing fabrics and designs. How blissfully unencumbered by lawsuits and threats of imminent incarceration.
The song playing over the Muzak system ended, and another began, something old and familiar from South Pacific. I couldn’t place the title, but hearing it, I felt a sharp, inexplicable pang.
“What’s this song?” I asked Gilbert.
He listened a moment.
“ ‘This Nearly Was Mine.’ Why?”
Two
IF THERE SHOULD BE AMONG MY readers any underpaid couriers who are contemplating giving notice, I can tell them right now that there’s no more agreeable place from which to do so than the first-class compartment of a 767 just after the free champagne’s come around.
“Carlos!” I said, ebulliently addressing my foul-tempered supervisor. “Cavanaugh here.”
“About fucking time!” replied Carlos, to whom an expletive-free sentence
was a pale and juiceless thing. “Where the hell are you?”
I told him, not omitting reference to the champagne. He countered incredibly that if I did not promptly report for duty I could consider myself fired. I assured him that I comprehended the gravity of my situation but could not focus on it fully at the moment as I’d just been handed a menu and couldn’t decide whether to have the merlot or cabernet with my steak au poivre.
“Any suggestions?”
He had one, of course, and, after making it, hung up.
As I pocketed my cell Claire nudged me and said, “Looks like the in-flight entertainment’s starting early.” She directed my attention to a drama unfolding on the other side of the cabin. It involved a dispute between a large disgruntled businessman and an aging Hollywood actress.
When I say she was an aging Hollywood actress, I do so not because I recognized her, for I did not. But everything about her dress and bearing so clearly announced this as her station in life that a child of three, beholding her, would have lisped, “Look, Mommy, an aging Hollywood actwess.”
The face was still pretty in a pixieish way with an upturned nose and a pert little chin. She’d traded in her wrinkles for the taut, pink translucence of the frequently pulled and peeled. Her vivid orange hair was teased high in the front, cascading down to a flip at the nape of her neck, giving her that aging cheerleader look familiar to anyone who has spent even two minutes on Rodeo Drive. Her outfit was chic in a retro “cocktails with Ike and Mamie” sort of way. She wore a kelly green travel cape and beneath that a blouse of copper silk with a high neck such as Katharine Hepburn favored in later life. Also deployed on wattle-hiding duty was a flowing red silk scarf. Charm bracelets adorned both wrists, and her ears sparkled with costume diamonds the size of doorknobs. This ensemble was finished by large dark glasses meant to convey the laughable pretense that she desired anonymity.
She was sitting in an aisle seat, scribbling intently in a small notebook and ignoring the many-chinned fellow glaring down at her.