When It Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

  The agent passed this on to Peter as an accusation.

  “What am I? Fucking Christmas-tree tinsel?” Peter vented to his roommate Ben as they walked to the L train. Ben worked at a juice bar in the East Village and commuted daily.

  Ben shrugged. “I’m a Jew. We don’t know from tinsel.”

  “I was good. I know I was. The way the writer looked at me when I was shaking their hands—”

  “You shake their hands?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “Of course I do. Don’t you?”

  Ben shook his head. “No.”

  “Wait! What, you just leave?” Peter wasn’t through venting, but he was intrigued. “You just wave or something?”

  “I don’t want them to think I’m kissing their ass,” Ben said. “Even though I would gladly kiss their ass if it would get me in someone’s movie. I’d put my tongue right in there—”

  “All right, all right.” Peter laughed. “I don’t think that’s Kosher.”

  “I would kiss the ass of a pig on the Sabbath if it would get me hired,” Ben went on. Commiserating about auditions and rejections was one of the best things about being friends with someone who struggled with the same ridiculous career. Peter was alternately amused and relieved whenever Ben would rant about losing out on a part. And while it shamed Peter to admit it, he was occasionally consoled by the fact that Ben had experienced even less success upon leaving Yale than Peter had. Over the years, Ben had booked fewer than a handful of parts in tiny productions, and the week before, Peter had come across an application for the LSAT on the kitchen counter while picking up his mail. Before too long, Peter figured, his friend and confidant would formally abandon his stalled acting career and head back to school to learn the family profession.

  When they arrived at the dingy staircase that led down into the subway station, Peter stopped and began rummaging through his backpack.

  “You go on,” he told Ben. “I got a meeting here.”

  “No shit?” Ben turned around. “And here I was feeling sorry for you.”

  Peter retrieved a Chinese-food menu with an address scrawled across it. “You can still feel sorry for me. It’s for a children’s television show.”

  Ben laughed. “You’re about as kid-friendly as an unsupervised wading pool.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence” Peter said, and headed west. He turned and yelled, “Yo! Bring home some wheatgrass!”

  Ben waved his hand over his shoulder as he descended underground.

  That night, Peter’s agent left a message on his answering machine. He was being called back.

  A week later, he was hired.

  The flight to Los Angeles was packed and seemed more full of babies and children than usual. Peter wore his sunglasses and Yankees cap and made sure to speak as little as possible so as to attract the least amount of attention. It was over two years since he had left Peter & Pooka in disgrace, though according to the press release, Peter had left after fifteen years to “pursue other ventures.” The network vehemently denied that there were drugs involved so as not to sully the magnificently successful brand that was Peter & Pooka, and except for the New York Post staff photographer who had snapped Peter leaving Beth Israel Hospital—where he had been treated for “exhaustion”—and printed it with the crushingly emasculating headline IS PETER POOPED? his reputation as the squeaky-clean companion of Pooka remained intact.

  The scandal surrounding Peter’s departure was quickly and willfully forgotten by the program’s loyal following, a forgiving group of fans primarily under the age of five. Their mothers forgave Peter, too, and perhaps were even titillated by his transgression. For years these same mothers watched Peter frolic in foreign countries, nibbling food they would never try, learning about exotic cultures they would never visit, and they were charmed by the seeming guilelessness and enthusiasm that Peter projected. Just when their lives had begun to be weighed down by the exhausting pressures of motherhood, and as their husbands retreated into earning for a family that they would rarely see, Peter offered them a fantasy. He was as much of a companion to the mothers as to their preschool-aged children. He embodied a collective emotional fantasy—a lovable man-child who, unlike their husbands, never got angry, never withdrew or neglected them. He was always there to distract and charm, clearly intelligent and reassuringly familiar. But he wasn’t real. Until that picture surfaced in the Post, Peter was indistinguishable from his funny, sunny counterpart, and then overnight he became a real man who had become intimately reacquainted with his shadow. The network fired him, but the mothers secretly loved him for it.

  Squeezing past the legs of a businessman on the aisle and an acne-afflicted teenager with headphones in the center seat, Peter sat by the window and stared out at the rain-soaked tarmac. It had been raining for days in New York, and he felt a twinge of hope as he visualized the mild weather in California. He was planning to stay with his twin sister, Lindsay, who had moved to Los Angeles years ago and had since found considerable success as a landscape artist for the affluent beach set. Lindsay had little formal training, but she had the gift of an intuitive eye inherited from their mother—a seemingly effortless way of creating an atmosphere of style and ease. Lindsay showed her clients a lifestyle as much as where to plant the perennials.

  She had been dogging her brother for weeks to visit, knowing how difficult life had become for him in New York. And although Peter had no want of money after fifteen years on the television show and could easily have paid for a hotel, his sister insisted that he stay with her. So he took her up on her offer, comforted by the thought of spending time with the one person to whom he felt he never had to explain anything.

  “Excuse me? Sir? Mr. Layton?”

  Peter turned to see a flight attendant kneeling in the aisle next to the businessman. She was a trim woman with bright-pink lipstick and streaked blond hair pulled back in a severe twist.

  “Would you mind coming with me?” When she smiled, Peter noticed a smear of pink lipstick smudged against her white teeth.

  Peter was startled. “Is there something wrong?”

  His two flying companions looked at him with vague interest. The teenager took the headphones out of his ears and squinted at him.

  “Dude, I know you,” he said.

  The flight attendant stood up and smoothed out her skirt. “I can carry your bag if it’s in the overhead.”

  “No,” Peter said. “I have my bag here.” He grabbed the magazines that he had stashed in the seat pocket and squeezed his way back out, apologizing as he tripped over the businessman’s legs.

  “You’re that polar-bear guy!” the teenager said. A few heads turned in his direction. “Trippy,” he heard the boy say as he hurried down the aisle after the flight attendant.

  There was a group of four other flight attendants waiting for him in the galley closest to the front, and they squealed when Peter entered, concerned and confused.

  “I’m Marcie,” the first attendant said. “We have an extra seat for you in first class, but we didn’t want to say anything in front of the other passengers.”

  “Oh,” Peter said. “That’s nice.” He smiled at the grinning women.

  One of the flight attendants, who stood at least two inches taller than him in flat shoes, grasped his hand. “But it’s on condition that you sign this for my son.” She giggled and thrust out a ticket printout and a green Sharpie, wrapping Peter’s fingers around it. “He loves you. Loves you. He sleeps with Pooka and dressed like you for Halloween two years in a row. I’m not kidding!”

  Peter obediently began to sign his name on the ticket. Another of the women, short and stout with a frizzy mop of hair dyed a burgundy color that never would have occurred in nature, took a steady stream of pictures with her cell phone.

  “He looked so cute in his striped purple turtleneck,” the flight-attendant mother for whom Peter was signing the ticket told her coworkers.

  Peter handed the ticket back and looked to
the other women. A brunette with eyes that seemed far too large for her face handed him a ticket of her own.

  “Can you make it out to Sailor? She’s my niece.”

  “Sailor? That’s an interesting name,” Peter said. He was overtired from not having slept the night before and for a moment could not remember how to spell “Sailor.”

  “I know, it had to grow on me,” the woman confessed. “Her daddy is a Marine.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Marcie said. “That’s just precious!”

  An Asian man poked his head in the galley and asked for a glass of water by motioning with his hands, pantomiming taking a drink. The burgundy-haired flight attendant who clearly had seniority shooed him away with her hands. “You need to take your seat now.”

  The man pointed to his seat, where his wife sat with a baby in her lap. He made the motion again for water.

  “Sir, you really need to take your seat. Now,” the woman said. She put her hand on his back and another on his shoulder and pushed him in the direction of his seat. “Go. Move. Sit.”

  The man walked back to his seat and sat down.

  “Sorry about that,” she said to Peter, laughing. “Some people just can’t follow rules.”

  Peter looked at the man, who was being questioned by his wife in Korean. As the husband unleashed his frustration on his wife, their baby began to wail. The passengers nearby rolled their eyes and covered their ears.

  “I think the water was for the baby,” Peter said.

  “They always say that,” the woman told him.

  The captain came on the loudspeaker, announcing in a friendly Texan drawl the plane’s position in line for takeoff. Peter felt a surge of relief knowing that soon he would be released from the women’s clutches. He posed for a picture with each flight attendant individually, then for a group picture snapped on self-timer with a point-and-shoot camera precariously perched on top of the galley cart. At their urging he acted out the show’s stock phrase—“Pep up, Pooka! Peter’s here!”—and then was shown by Marcie to first class, collapsing into his seat, hot and flushed, his hair sticking in ribbons to the perspiration on his forehead.

  He felt as though he had never before paid so much for a ticket in his life.

  Upon exiting the terminal at baggage claim, Peter was smacked in the face with a gust of hot, tobacco-scented air. All of the smokers stood huddled in groups, sucking on the cigarettes as if they were oxygen. Peter, a casual smoker back when he was at Yale and later when he was a promising actor in New York—and then secretly for the past fifteen years because of clause number 34b in his contract that stated that he would be fined in increasing increments if a picture of him smoking was ever published—walked over to what looked to be a sixtysomething career smoker and asked to bum a cigarette. When the end was ignited and Peter got a good pull, he thanked her and walked to the curb, watching the police officers in bright-green safety vests harass the drivers and arbitrarily ticket them if they failed to move along with sufficient haste. Peter counted at least three teary reunions interrupted by one of these stocky, ill-tempered oafs. One longhaired young man in a surfing hoodie, who had clearly been looking forward to his reunion with his girlfriend, cocked his head and wrinkled his brow.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” he said.

  The cop reddened in the face and advanced toward him. “You want a ticket?”

  “No, I don’t want a ticket.” The man stepped in front of his dreadlocked girlfriend. “I want to know why you have to be such an asshole.”

  His girlfriend, so thin that the bones of her clavicles stuck out like butter knives, tugged at his collar and tried to get him to lift her suitcase.

  The cop pulled out his pad and began writing the ticket just as Peter heard Lindsay beep her horn.

  His sister sat in the worn leather driver’s seat in a white vintage Mercedes convertible with the top down. “Hey, Pumpkin-eater!” She smiled at her brother. He tossed the cigarette in the gutter, threw his small bag in the backseat, and hopped in the front.

  She was wearing an off-white bohemian sundress with the collar embroidered in black. It looked like something that he’d seen on a Greek island or on Ibiza, where he had spent one marijuana-infused summer flush with his first-year earnings from the show. Her arms were tan, and her long, dark curly hair had fewer silver streaks running though them than his had.

  He leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.

  “Welcome to L.A., honey,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Glad to be here. Glad to be anywhere but New York right now.”

  She glanced in her rearview mirror and merged into the traffic. “You smell like an ashtray,” she said.

  Peter rummaged around in her glove box for a mint or gum.

  “Do you have one?” she said. “I’ve been dying for a smoky treat all day.”

  “Oh. I thought you quit.”

  “I did,” she said. “That’s why I don’t have any, silly!”

  Peter closed the glove box and leaned back. “Sorry, I bummed one from a lady out front.”

  “Tant pis,” Lindsay said. “Hey, did I tell you? Didier is really looking forward to seeing you.

  Peter nodded, uncommitted. Didier was Lindsay’s boyfriend going on ten years now. The Frenchman did not wish to marry his sister, claiming that marriage was “beaucoup trop bourgeois.” He also chose not to have a green card, so that he never legally had the right to work in the country. Instead, he took pictures for obscure publications in France for little to no money and lived off Peter’s sister, alternately adoring and despising her, depending on the fluctuations of his ego. Infuriatingly, his sister remained inexplicably devoted to him. Peter suspected that Didier had become an accessory of sorts in her fashion-driven lifestyle. He looked good in the slim bespoke suits that he had tailored for himself when he was required to leave the country every three months, stopping in either London or France for a week before returning to the U.S. on another three-month tourist visa. His ties came from Charvet in Paris, his suits from Henry Poole, a Saville Row tailor with a self-professed connection to royalty, and his monogramed, made-to-order shirts from Brooks Brothers. Peter had to admit that for all of his sister’s money that Didier invested in his wardrobe, he somehow managed to never look as though he was trying.

  “So he’s in town this week?” Peter asked as they accelerated onto the freeway ramp.

  “Just got back from Paris last week. He picked up these amazing Charlotte Perriand sconces from this lady downstairs from his mother. Crazy. She had no idea what they were.”

  Peter nodded. He had no idea what they were either—neither the designer nor the word “sconce”—but he figured that in Lindsay’s world of style and design, this was a big deal.

  Peter grinned as the hot Los Angeles air flooded the car. Feeling warm for the first time in months, he stretched out and closed his eyes.

  “Tired?” Lindsay asked.

  “Mmm,” Peter murmured.

  “Hey, I wanted to ask if you mind, but I’m having a few people over for dinner tonight. Not a huge deal.”

  Peter opened his eyes. He felt the startling surge of discomfort he often felt when confronted by the prospect of being around successful people. Lindsay weaved her car in and out of traffic, cutting off at least three cars. A hybrid Honda honked its horn at her and its driver flipped her off.

  “Sorry!” She waved her ringed hand at the driver and blew him a kiss.

  “What kind of people?” Peter asked her.

  “What kind of people where?” she said.

  Lindsay was conspicuously forgetful. Peter had been alternately amused and annoyed by this since they were kids.

  “The party that you were talking about less than thirty seconds ago?”

  “Oh you know, a mixture. A potpourri,” she said. “All good.”

  Peter didn’t feel particularly buoyed by her description, but he also knew that Lindsay’s parties were a part of he
r work and didn’t feel that he had the right to refuse. He was a guest in their home—at least until he moved to a hotel, which now seemed inevitable.

  “I might duck out, go see a movie or something, if that’s all right with you.”

  Lindsay frowned at him and almost missed braking as the Subaru in front of her abruptly slowed down.

  “Don’t do that, P. I’m having this party for you!”

  “For me? Oh God. Why didn’t you ask me? Or give me a day to—”

  “To what, to decide you hate it here and run back to New York? I want to introduce you to people. People you should know.”

  By the time they had pulled off the freeway onto the Pacific Coast Highway and Peter had breathed in the ocean air, managing to catch a glimpse of the great ball of sun as it sank behind the water, he had forgiven his sister for attempting to reinvent him. It was her business, after all, to help make people look better than they were, so why not him?

  Lindsay’s house had changed significantly since the last time Peter had seen it. He had given her the money for the down payment a decade ago, after Peter & Pooka had just become a phenomenon. Lindsay was just beginning her career and chose a tear-down in Venice, California, at the perfect time—pre-dating the enormous gentrification of the area, perhaps even helping to initiate it. Rather than destroy the house entirely, Lindsay had modified it so that, though practically unrecognizable, it kept certain key elements: wavy old windows, exposed beams salvaged from an old Venice pier. She even left an enormous old fig tree that grew in what was originally the front yard of the house, building the additions around it. The concrete floor had drains in it so that when it rained, the water channeled through the floor and into a complicated watering system that cycled into the garden.

  Peter lay down on the bed in the guesthouse and closed his eyes. People would be arriving in a couple of hours for the party, but his eyes burned with the pull of sleep. He knew that if he fell asleep now, there was little chance he would be able to rally for tonight, so he forced himself out of bed and dropped to the floor, halfheartedly attempting push-ups.