Best to Laugh: A Novel

by Lorna Landvik

  “Candy, Candy,” said Mike, his hand outstretched. “Don’t go. Lance’s views are not representational of the views at large.”

  He rendered this announcement in a I’m-a-serious-newscaster voice.

  “Da,” said Boris. “Just because Lance has got a problem appreciating funny women does not mean we do also.”

  “Amen,” said Solly. “My girlfriend’s hilarious. Especially without her clothes on.”

  “Ha ha,” I said, but smiled, knowing that even while sticking up for me, jokes must be told. I sat down.

  “Hey, Solly, don’t bogie that,” said Lance, holding out his fingers, and he gulped in what was left to be gulped of the joint that had burned down to a glowing ember.

  “And my mother,” said Mike, “my mom’s the person who made me want to get into comedy. Wit’s her middle name.”

  “And my mother!” said Boris. “My mother’s middle name meant same!” He spoke a word in Russian that sounded a little bit like “octopus.”

  As the men in the room laughed, trying to pronounce the Russian word for wit, I got up again, leaving the room foggy with marijuana smoke, repeating silently and with just a touch of weariness my power mantra.

  MIKE INTRODUCED ME DIFFERENTLY in Santa Cruz, playing on his trumpet several bars of “Doin’ What Comes Naturally” from the musical Annie Get Your Gun.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, what Candy Ohi does naturally is make people laugh. At least that’s some of what she does naturally. The other stuff is frankly none of your business.”

  Our shows were very well received, although the audience in San Jose seemed to tacitly agree to make it Student Heckler Night, and while Mike and I flourished in these circumstances, it threw off the others, in particular Lance, who was proud that he was the show’s closer and was nearly apoplectic when a couple of audience members kept shouting, “I want Candy!”

  Having entertained ourselves in the bar afterwards by repeating some of Lance’s clunky insults (“You know what a moron looks like? Get a mirror!”), Mike and I giggled our way down a motel hallway that smelled of cigarettes and Fritos, and when we got to my door, he wrapped his arms around me and confessed, “I want Candy, too.”

  Floored and excited, I answered, “I want Mike,” and after I jammed my key in the lock, we pushed the door open and tumbled into the room and onto the stiff, flammable bedspread covering the concave mattress.

  We were inhaling one another with kisses, our hands frisking one another like thorough arresting officers, and I would like to report here that some wild, tawdry sex ensued, but ensue it did not.

  “Oh, Candy,” groaned Mike, pulling himself away from me. “Oh God, Candy, I’m so sorry. I can’t do this to Kirsten.”

  He rolled off the bed.

  “Sorry!” he said, lunging for the door as if he’d heard a fire alarm.

  It was shocking to go from being in the throes of lust to being so suddenly abandoned, but what was worse was to be abandoned by a nice guy who didn’t want to cheat on his girlfriend.

  I was thankful that our make-out-and-nothing-more session happened near the end of the tour rather than the beginning; at least the awkwardness wouldn’t be prolonged. Nervous when we all met in the motel restaurant for breakfast the next morning, I saw Mike feeding pennies into the Lions Club gumball machine but pretended I didn’t.

  He was braver than I. “Look, Candy, I was a jerk and I’m sorry. I hope—”

  “—at least you have hope,” I said dramatically. “Now that you’ve dashed mine.”

  Mike looked at me warily and then seeing something in my eyes, smiled.

  “So we’re friends?” he said, offering me a cherry gumball.

  “Since we can’t be anything else,” I said, holding up my palm.

  “Guys,” said Boris, slapping a folded copy of the San Jose Mercury newspaper against his thigh. “Guys, we got reviewed, and it’s good!”

  MELVIN HAD COLLECTED MY MAIL while I was on tour, and I took a nice big stack down to the pool, happy to see Ed on a chaise longue. It had been a long time since we’d been together poolside.

  “What is it this time?” I asked, noticing the book splayed open on his stomach. “Secret alien landings or a government run amok?”

  “Neither,” said Ed, and as I settled into the lawn chair next to him, he passed me the book.

  “Love, Trust, and Who Takes Out the Garbage?”

  The long look I gave him asked, “Are you kidding me?” and Ed’s flush darkened his already pink skin.

  “I know, I know. I can’t believe I’m reading it—let alone bringing it to a public place.”

  “Are you and Sharla having problems?”

  “Don’t mince words, Candy. And no, we’re not. Well, not many. Some.” He opened the cooler. “Good news—the YaZoo’s officially gone.” He handed me a can of Orange Crush. “To tell you the truth, Candy, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going with her. She just seems . . . well, she’s sure not like you.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “Definitely,” said Ed, opening his can. “What I mean is—you don’t have any of those feminine wiles . . . you’re just a regular person. She’s like, I don’t know, I just can’t figure her out. She spends so much time on how she looks; wouldn’t you think a person who looks like Sharla would be fairly confident in herself? Once I waited for two hours while she got ready, and she winds up crying because she ‘doesn’t have anything to wear’! Still, as much as she drives me crazy, I’m crazy about her.”

  Nodding at the book on his lap, I asked, “So who does take out the garbage?”

  “Usually not the person who brings it in, but I didn’t have to read a book to figure that out.” He shook his head, leaned back in the chaise longue, and shut his eyes.

  “Don’t think you’re off the hook,” I said as I rifled through my mail. “You’re still going to have to explain that feminine wiles stuff . . . oh!”

  Ed opened one eye.

  “It’s from Terry,” I said, waving a postcard. “My friend from the Rogue Mansion?”

  Opening his other eye, Ed nodded, having met her at one of my comedy performances.

  “She’s in Nepal!”

  “Nepal, cool.”

  “I haven’t seen her since before my tour, and I was going to call her today!”

  “So what does she say?”

  I stared at her neat handwriting for a moment before I read the card.

  “’It took me a while, but you leaving the R.M. finally inspired me to do the same. What do I need benefits for? I’m young! So here I am looking up at Mt. Everest—I don’t have the urge to climb it, but I always wanted to see it!’”

  Ed and I laughed the way you will over a good surprise.

  “That’s great,” he said, shutting his eyes again.

  Thumbing through bills and bank statements, I came across a tissue-thin blue airmail envelope.

  My gasp sounded like a little huuh.

  “What now?” said Ed. “Did she fall in love with a sherpa?”

  “No,” I said, tearing open the envelope. “It’s from my grandmother.” I unfolded the letter and with greedy eyes scanned the first few lines. “Oh, my God!”

  Ed sat up. “Candy, is everything all right?”

  “She . . . she, well, oh my God, she got married! At the courthouse, before they left for Tahiti! She says they wanted the trip to be a real honeymoon!”

  I turned to Ed, feeling the prickle of tears in my eyes.

  “My grandma got married!”

  “So it seems.”

  I read on, each sentence inciting from me a sigh or an exclamation.

  “That must be some letter,” said Ed.

  “It is. Listen to this last paragraph.” I cleared my throat and began to read.

  Candy, my husband (I love that word!), Sven, is taking a nap now and snoring in a nice, fluttery way, and if I look out one window I see a blue blue ocean, and if I sit by another I see two lovely maids dr
essed in sarongs (they call them pareus) chatting under a palm tree.

  Who’d think that I’d ever be in a tropical paradise with a man I had found love with, after I thought love was just a memory? Thank you so much for this gift of a Tahitian honeymoon (a real Tahitian Treat, ha ha), but so much more, thank you for the gift of being my granddaughter. As Sven (my husband!) likes to say, “Ain’t life grand?”

  XXX and some Os,

  Grandma.

  Ed and I sat quietly for a while, and then nodding toward the mail on my lap, he said, “So that’s it? Just Nepal and Tahiti? Nothing from Outer Mongolia or Barbados?”

  38

  NOT ONLY DID CLAIRE HELLMAN have lots of ideas, she acted on them. She was her own high-voltage transformer, humming with so much energy that I joked I didn’t dare touch her for fear of getting shocked. Within months of thinking of making a documentary about Francis and the Bel Mondo, she had managed to get a public television contract and funding and had already begun interviewing him.

  “He is so excited,” said Frank. “He met with Claire again yesterday at the Chateau Marmont, and he comes home whistling. He’s whistling more than he’s talking!”

  We were in a guitar shop on Sunset, viewing the instruments on the wall as if they were pieces of art, which, to Frank, I suppose they were.

  “Claire told me she’s getting some great stuff. She says your dad’s a great storyteller.”

  Frank’s nostrils flared and he pursed his mouth, moving it from side to side.

  “Sorry,” he said, after a moment. “I’m just so happy for him.”

  I looped my arm through his. “Me, too.”

  “Hey you,” said a greasy-haired sales clerk in a tone that suggested we were riffraff instead of potential customers. “Aren’t you in United States of Despair?”

  Frank, as surprised as I was, stared at the clerk.

  “Yeah,” he said warily, as if waiting to hear the clerk’s negative review. “Yeah, I am.”

  “I thought so,” said the clerk, wagging his head. “I’ve seen you guys at the Masque, and the Whiskey. You’re radical, man.”

  “Thanks, man,” said Frank gruffly.

  The sales clerk gestured to a guitar on the wall. “You want to try out this Stratocaster? I saw you looking at it.”

  “Sure,” said Frank, and despite his tough-guy mien his eyes shone with excitement.

  MAEVE’S FATHER WASN’T THE subject of a documentary, but she was as proud of him as Frank was of Francis.

  “Candy, you can’t believe how his students adore him,” she said, as we sat in dappled shade on the rickety bench facing the Hills’s tennis court. Winter was here and while the temperature was in the midseventies, there was a thinness to the late-afternoon light. “Egon said he’s the best teacher he’s ever had.”

  “Who’s Egon?”

  Maeve pressed her lips together, but her smile quickly broke the seal.

  “This guy I met. At the university.”

  Maeve had just come home from a trip to Germany, and we had celebrated her return with a game of tennis. It might have been more of a celebration for me, since it was the first time in our history that I had beaten her. She blamed her defeat on jet lag.

  “Uh, think you could spare a few more details?”

  “Jawohl!” Maeve tucked a section of her lank blonde hair behind her ear. “He’s tall—taller than me, and I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to look up to a guy—and his English is flawless. Flawless with the kind of accent you’d expect to hear from someone narrating a fairy tale.”

  “Oh, brother,” I said. “You’ve got it bad.”

  “Candy, he’s the first guy I’ve ever felt . . . I don’t know, at ease with. Like I don’t have to apologize for anything. Anytime we were together—having coffee or taking a walk—I never felt any of that nervous dating ickiness.”

  We laughed, at both the words nervous dating ickiness and the shared understanding of what a lousy state to be in nervous dating ickiness was.

  “Egon makes me feel like I only have to be myself with him and oh, Candy, he’s so smart. Smart, kind, and he doesn’t think it’s weird that I’m a bodybuilder. In fact, he thinks my body is schön.”

  “Schön’s good, jah?”

  “Schön is zehr good.”

  Deciding to have dinner together, we wandered down the path, and as we debated whether to go to a Thai place or Musso & Frank a sudden cry stopped us cold in our tracks.

  “Did you hear that?” whispered Maeve.

  My nod was frantic.

  There was a romantic ruin to the Hills—it could have been the estate of Gloria Swanson in the movie Sunset Boulevard, years after William Holden’s body was pulled out of the pool. I liked playing tennis on the dilapidated court (the ghosts of movie moguls arguing whether a lobbed ball was in or out), plus it was nice to escape into its almost jungle-like greenery set in the middle of a city. Still, there was an element of creepiness that made it a place I’d never venture into alone; the guy with the beard and a rucksack most likely was a hiker, but there was a chance he was the Hillside Strangler; the teenaged couple smoking pot by the crumbling chimney was probably skipping school, but they might be a modern-day version of Bonnie and Clyde, trigger fingers itchy.

  There was another sob, and a tortured, “God! God damn it!”

  Trying to figure out where the noise was coming from, Maeve and I bumped into each other.

  “There he is,” I whispered, pointing to a figure sitting amid the gnarled, aboveground roots of a fig tree.

  We watched as the man put a bottle to his lips.

  “He’s drunk,” said Maeve.

  I squinted. “It’s Jaz!”

  We looked at each other, asking silent questions with nods and shrugs. The man was obviously in distress: should we approach him? But didn’t the fact that he’d hiked up here convey a certain wish to keep his distress private? Deciding that his misery might be elevated by discovery, we tacitly agreed to leave but hadn’t taken two steps when Jaz’s voice stopped us.

  “Hey!” he cried out. “Hey you!”

  He struggled to stand among the thick fingers of roots but sank back down, his bottle clunking against the wood.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  Now more concerned than wary, Maeve and I raced over to him, asking him if he was all right.

  “Do I sound like I’m all right?” Examining the bottle he thanked it for not breaking and took a sloppy swig of its remains. Whiskey dribbled down his chin, and when he wiped at it with the back of his hand his bloodshot eyes filled with tears.

  I felt a stir of fear; something was really wrong.

  “Jaz, is Aislin okay?”

  The handsome, inebriated building manager jerked his head.

  “Aislin? Have you heard from Aislin?”

  “No. I just thought . . . well, from the way you’re acting, I thought something might have happened to her.”

  “I haven’t heard a word from that whore, other than the whore wants a divorce.”

  The look Maeve and I shared said it was time to go, and as we turned, Jaz wailed, “Don’t go! Please!”

  He sounded so pathetic we had to stop.

  “Okay, but if you talk about Aislin like that again, we’re leaving.”

  “Yeah,” added Maeve.

  “But she left me!” wailed Jaz. “She left me and now I’ve got nothing! No wife and now I’ve lost the best job of my life!”

  “You got fired from Peyton Hall?” asked Maeve.

  He made an odd noise, like a dog whose tail had been stepped on, followed by a bellowing “Ha!” and then he slumped against the tree trunk, pounding his knee as he laughed.

  Maeve and I stood like befuddled scientists, watching our test monkey throw an unanticipated fit.

  “Hoo, hoo,” said Jaz, finally, wiping his blue and red eyes. “That’s a good one! Managing Peyton Hall is the best job of my life!” He pulled at his nose as the final vestiges of laughter rumbled out of hi
s chest, sighed, and tried to stand up but was unsuccessful, plopping down, hard. After some dips and weaving, he staggered upward like a boxer who’d been hit too many times.

  “But no, Mary,” he said, looking dully at Maeve, “my very best job, or should I say job offer, was playing the role of Errol Flynn.”

  “Jaz,” I said, “what happened?”

  “They’re not going to make the bloody film! They strung me along all this time, but the green light finally turned red. And I’m out.”

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  Jaz’s head wobbled and with a great sigh, he took a step, nearly falling on the tree roots.

  “Here,” said Maeve, and rushing forward, she put one arm around him. “Candy, get him on the other side.”

  FLANKING HIM, we stumbled down the path, through the broken gate, and onto Fuller Avenue, consoling Jaz as he alternately raged and wept.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” he asked, his voice high as he overpronounced his syllables. “Go back to Vancouver and play another fucking mountaineer on Wiley’s Way? Which, as piss-ant as it was, was the best part I’d had in a year! But all those little piddly piss-ant parts didn’t matter, because I knew I was going to play Errol Flynn. In the biggest movie of the year, of the decade! People were finally going to know who Jaz Delwyn was!”

  Instead of walking all the way to Hollywood Boulevard, we cut between two of the apartment buildings facing Fuller—one was Madame Pepper’s—and made our way across the center grounds of Peyton Hall, past the neon sign, and across the lawn to Jaz’s apartment.

  “Mr. Delwyn!” said Werner, holding a sprinkler. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been shot,” said Jaz.

  “Wass?” said the Swiss handyman, alarmed.

  Both Maeve and I sought to reassure him; I shook my head and Maeve said, “No, he hasn’t.”

  Jaz lurched to a stop, and Maeve and I made adjustments to keep him upright while keeping our balance.

  “Yes, I most certainly have,” he said to Werner. “Shot through the heart by the assassin Hollywood.”