Best to Laugh: A Novel

by Lorna Landvik

  “Coming right up,” I said and laughed for the hundredth time.

  “THAT’S SOME wall,” said Melvin, as I refilled his coffee cup. He squinted behind his magnified glasses at one of the drawn silhouettes and its signature. “Oh, Blank Frank,” he said, smiling. “You know he stopped by to see me the other day. He’s grown out his mohawk! He looks like Francis!”

  “I know,” I said. “I asked him to come by, but he had a date.”

  “HEY, MELVIN,” said Maeve. “You should be on the wall. Seeing as what a part of Peyton Hall you are.”

  “That’s a great idea,” I said and after completing my coffee-refill duties, I got the black permanent marker. “Melvin, you figure out how you want to pose and one of us will draw you.” I waved the pen. “Who’s feeling artistic?”

  “Well, I always am,” said Melvin, raising his hand. “But, tell you what: rather than having my silhouette up there, may I draw something freehand?”

  “Be my guest.” I handed him the marker.

  Mike put his arm around me as I sat between him and Solange on the plaid couch; that we shared a secret made me even giddier.

  Melvin padded over to the wall, the seat of his herringbone polyester pants so flat and droopy you had to wonder where his butt went. He stood studying the wall for a moment before turning to look at me. Cocking his head from one side to the other, his hand was suddenly on the wall, the pen moving fast. After each glance directed at me, he’d made a few more strokes with his pen until he stepped aside.

  “Ta da!” he said.

  “Candy,” said Ed from the plaid chair. “It’s you!”

  “My interpretation of our lovely hostess,” said Melvin.

  “It looks just like you!” Maeve said, and she was right. It was a caricature—all my features were exaggerated—my mouth looked like a bow and my eyes were barely two diagonal slashes—but the owner of those features was beyond doubt.

  “Oh, Melvin,” I said, laughing. “That’s great! Do another one!”

  “With pleasure.” Melvin fixed his squint on Mike and his pen on the wall, and in what seemed like seconds he was finished. This earned applause; he had drawn Mike so that it appeared he was gazing at me, with puppy dog–like devotion.

  “Hey, you’ve got me looking—”

  “—besotted,” said Ed, giving me a knowing look.

  “We used to do this all the time in the studio,” said Melvin, after his rendering of Solange, with a no-nonsense yet sly expression that limned her perfectly. “And we’d time each other, see which one of us could draw the others the best and the fastest.”

  “Did you usually win?” I asked.

  “Well,” Melvin bowed his head, smiling, “yes.”

  We all sat rapt, watching the old animator work his magic. I was tucked under Mike’s arm, and every time his hand squeezed my shoulder, I pressed my leg against his.

  Melvin almost ran out of space, our heads appearing above or between the already-drawn silhouettes. I heard Maeve gasp when he finished with her portrait; it was funny and exaggerated like the rest of ours, but somehow he had captured the blobby little baby inside the fierce bodybuilder.

  Ed’s reaction to Melvin’s depiction of him, on the other hand, was one of protest.

  “I’ve got more hair than that!” he said, palming the top of his head as if to make sure.

  We applauded Melvin as he made his way back to his chair, and his smile was so wide I thought his dentures might fall out. This thought of course made me laugh.

  “Honestly, Candy, what is going on?” asked Maeve.

  “Yeah, what gives?” said Solange. “You’re so . . . bubbly.”

  “Candy, come clean,” said Ed. “Are you on medication?”

  Mike nudged me. “Better tell them.”

  “Okay!” I sprang off the couch.

  Standing next to the little table the answering machine was on, I felt my heart racing.

  “I’d like to share something with you.” I pressed the Play button.

  “Candy?” came my grandmother’s voice. “Candy, is that you?”

  “Wait,” I said, pressing Stop and skipping ahead to the next message. “Okay, here we go.”

  “Hi Candy, this is Eric,” came the voice of my agent and I heard Solange shush the group.

  “Great news—I just heard from the Carson people! They saw The Sorta Late Show and now they’re coming to see you Friday night at the Comedy Store. I know you’ll knock ’em dead. The Tonight Show, Candy! Love you.”

  The beep ending the message sounded, and feeling a little weak-kneed I pressed my spine against the wall. My friends stared at me and I stared back, astonishment muzzling us into silence until Maeve’s congratulations set off everyone else.

  Mike stood up.

  “To Candy!” he said, and everyone joined him in raising their coffee cups high, and after the toast Melvin emptied his cup with a long swig before flinging it across the room.

  It bounced, as my unbreakable dishes always did, against the wall.

  He was like the point man firing the first shot, and a volley of cups followed and a splash of coffee darkened the flexed arm of Maeve’s silhouette and a dribble ran down Solange’s caricature and a spray of drops decorated the invisible guitar of John Lennon’s that Frank’s silhouette held.

  I was awed, watching this celebratory throwing-of-the-cups-spilling-of-the-coffee, and so moved, I hurled my own cup against the wall.

  It exploded, as if it were crystal, bone china, or porcelain and not my unbreakable Melnor—with its guarantee that “When company comes over, the only thing broken will be bread!” And yet, I had shattered it.

  THE BEDROOM WINDOW facing the Boulevard was open and only occasionally would the deep night quiet be stirred by a passing car. If I shut my eyes, I could imagine myself at the ocean; the in-and-out-going waves the soft and steady sighs of Mike’s sleeping breaths. But I couldn’t shut my eyes; I was wired as a circuit board.

  I had sent my guests home with pieces of cake—my version of a hostess gift—and when Melvin said his good-byes, he kissed my cheek and said, “Kiddo, you really know how to throw a party.”

  Now the weight of his compliment struck me: Yes! That was all I ever wanted to do, all any comic really wants to do—throw a party. A little laugh bubbled up within me; all night I’d been a fault-line generating little tremors of giggles, snorts, chuckles.

  For the fifth or one-hundredth time, my agent’s voice came into my head, telling me that the Carson people were coming to see my act!

  More laughter stuttered through me and my agent’s voice was drowned out by the words of my secret power mantra in the voice of my mother: Best to laugh. It came again, in Madame Pepper’s whisper at the airport: Best to laugh. Both of them together, singing a chorus I always knew: Best to laugh, best to laugh, best to laugh.

  Epilogue

  TODAY, there are a lot more women who wield real comedy power, but as of this writing there is still no one of the fairer sex hosting a major late-night talk show. Joan Rivers had a brief run at it, but in terms of not getting any respect she could teach Rodney Dangerfield a thing or two. Cable TV has begun to wise up, but as far as network television goes it’s still a petulant boys’ club that’s in no hurry to expand its membership.

  Melanie Breyer was right about The Sorta Late Show with Candy Ohi: there was a life beyond the Swan Theater, and we took the show on the road, playing in twenty-one cities. The highlight for me was performing in the same theater in which my grandmother and I had seen Holly Wheaton. The highlight for Mike was having his college town, Lincoln, Nebraska, present him with the key to the city.

  “Dang, it doesn’t fit,” he joked, struggling to put the two-foot-long ceremonial key onto his key ring.

  Because of the tour, I didn’t get to hunker down with Melvin Slyke and Vince Perrogio, the last holdouts, after a long tough fight, to leave Peyton Hall.

  I was, however, back in town to watch a wrecking ball crash into what ha
d been the east side of my apartment. Mike, Ed, and I stood across the street on the other side of Hollywood Boulevard, and every time the chain swung and the ball smashed into the stucco and wood, I felt it in my stomach.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, watching the tiled wall of my shower collapse.

  As Ed’s camera clicked, the vise of Mike’s grip tightened around my shoulders, and when we watched the last wall tumble—the one decorated with silhouettes and caricatures and splashes of coffee—he held me up when my knees turned to pudding.

  CONCENTRATED AS THEY were on fame and glory, my girlhood dreams didn’t leave much space to envisage a guy like Mike Trowbridge, which goes to show you how limited girlhood dreams can be.

  I married him in the black cocktail dress with the smattering of sequins that Madame Pepper had insisted I get for special occasions. I also wore it to the Emmy Awards, when Mike and I were nominated for writing an episode of Blades!, a sitcom about a women’s hockey team. (My calendaeium entry for that day reads: Oh, well, it was an honor to be nominated.) My favorite go-to apparel for swanky events, it was worn to dinner parties in homes with Malibu and Brentwood zip codes and a reception honoring Ed as Los Angeles Public School Teacher of the Year.

  Six years after I had entered Giorgio’s, shyly whispering to the cool, blonde Cynthia the code words, “Madame Pepper wants you to help me find a party dress,” I wore it, for the last time, to my benefactor’s funeral.

  We had kept up a correspondence after she moved to Vienna, and when my book Wise Acre was published, I sent her the second publisher’s copy (my grandma getting first dibs).

  “I am so proud of you,” she wrote in her thank you card. “Very funny, and such deft use of articles.”

  After her funeral service, Taryn Powell and I rode the train together, heading to Munich and a reunion with Maeve, Egon, and Andreas, my godchild (!).

  “Ah, riding the rails,” said my seatmate, as we settled into a club car booth, the windows offering a moving postcard of the green Austrian countryside.

  “To Madame Pepper, a true Hollywood legend,” said Taryn, after the white-gloved waiter delivered our drinks and we clinked glasses. “Responsible for more Hollywood careers than MGM and Warner Bros. put together.”

  “You really think that?” I said, impressed.

  After a moment, Taryn said, “No,” and we shared a laugh.

  “But you believed in her powers, didn’t you?”

  The actress raised her eyebrows. At least I think she did: thanks to the pinches and pulls of a recent face-lift, Taryn’s lovely visage now wore a permanent expression of mild surprise.

  “It’s easier for me to believe in clairvoyance than a lot of other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh,” she said, twirling the speared olive in her glass. “World peace. Lasting love.”

  Looking at me, she chuckled. “I know, I know. Both you and Maeve would make strong cases about the lasting love business. And I wish you luck.”

  “Which we’ll probably need,” I said, not cynically. Showbiz—and life in general—had taught me that however and whenever luck comes your way, you tackle it and hold on.

  A glass of white wine, the slight swaying of the train, and jet lag made me both sleepy and contemplative, and I considered telling Taryn what Madame Pepper had whispered to me when I’d left her at the airport all those years ago. But I hadn’t even told Mike the words of my life saber, even as I understood he embraced their philosophy. No, how the Hollywood soothsayer came to know my secret power mantra is a puzzle I’m content to be amused and a little awed by.

  THE BLACK COCKTAIL DRESS had felt a little snug at Madame Pepper’s funeral and the reason I had suspected was confirmed by my gynecologist.

  Loren Barney was born two and a half years before his sister, Lily Bea. There are many reasons children resent their parents, but so far neither of ours thinks giving them middle names inspired by favorite characters on The Andy Griffith Show worthy of severing family ties. As to their first names, Loren was a baby book name we both liked; Lily of course was named after my grandmother—with whom, happily, both my kids got to spend lots of time, thanks to Mike agreeing to my suggestion of sorta-bicoastal (one East Coast, one landlocked state) living.

  “We can keep our apartment in Manhattan. And buy a little house in Minneapolis. By the creek. Or one of the lakes.”

  We’d moved to New York when Mike was hired as the head writer for the hit sitcom You’re My What? We could have been hired as a team (see Emmy nomination), but I declined, choosing to stay at home with our bambinos. That was a big surprise—how much I enjoyed being a mother. Besides, I was working on my second novel (the first finding its permanent, and proper, home in the bottom of a file cabinet). My published book of essays had been an expansion of my calendaieum notations; now I was discovering that the joys (and frustrations) of writing fiction were equal to the joys (and frustrations) of performing stand-up. I still booked comedy gigs, although more and more I was accepting only those within driving range, the allure of touring and telling jokes fading when compared to that of staying home and telling bedtime stories.

  Our realtor found us a bungalow by Minnehaha Creek, and one of my first decorating tasks was to hang pictures of Hollywood Boulevard in the bathroom and my cocktail dress on the wall of our bedroom.

  If I had a super power, it would have been one that shielded my grandmother from that which we all must face, but after she suffered a stroke, I did what I humanly could, which was to be with her in her last days. Sven, parked on one side of the bed, was mute with grief, so it was up to me and my aunts, Pauline and Lorraine, to hold my grandmother’s hand, to caress her wispy dyed hair, and recount the news of the day—the everyday family events that somehow ratchet up to the extraordinary when they’re about your loved ones. Once while telling her about Loren’s kindergarten girlfriend and Lily getting into the flour bin and creating a blizzard in our kitchen, I like to think she smiled, but it may have been a twitch.

  When the nurse told us in her soft earnest voice that it was time to say good-bye, I said, “Oh kid!”

  Grandma, always my best audience, would have laughed at that, but as she had more important things to do, I kissed her cheek and told her that I loved her, so grateful that I wasn’t telling her anything that she didn’t already know.

  EVEN THOUGH IT’S BEEN DECADES since I lived in Peyton Hall, I still have a recurring dream about it, and the night before last, back in Hollywood, I dreamed it again. It’s always the same: most of the four-plexes have been torn down and the pool has been paved over, but tenants are still squatting in the back buildings, which are missing walls or steps or rooftops. They’re not nightmares, but there is a sense of disquiet and loss when I wake up.

  “What do you suppose they mean?” I’ve asked Mike. “That I didn’t finish what I wanted to in Hollywood?”

  “Do you feel that way?”

  “No. Except for being on The Tonight Show with lousy guest hosts.”

  The needle on my Thrill-O-Meter couldn’t have registered higher when I was booked on the Carson show—twice!—but it fell notches backwards when a guest host—twice!—sat behind Johnny’s desk. It’s a small bone of good-natured contention (good-natured on his part) that the one time Mike appeared as a comic on the show, Johnny was hosting.

  I LOOK AT MY HUSBAND now, his hair still curly but more gray than brown. He’s wearing airplane headphones and an eye mask (he’s not afraid to fly but prefers not to see what’s underneath him—especially when it’s an ocean).

  Yesterday Ed had asked us how we had gotten so lucky, and both Mike and I, at the same time, said, “I got lucky.”

  Ed laughed. “See, that’s what I want. Someone to be in sync with.”

  “You’re not dead yet,” said Solange. “Look at Kay and me. I’d just about given up on ever finding love, and then there she was.”

  “Was she aware of your musical tastes?” I asked, as a nasally voice yodeling about
a good-time gal gone bad was piped through the sound system and into their backyard.

  “She’s got a theory about cowboy music and menopause,” said Kay, twirling her finger near her temple.

  “Sure, call me crazy,” said Solange. “But I’m telling you, minor key music is soothing—it helps minimize the intensity of hot flashes.”

  I fanned my own sweaty face. “Then crank it up.”

  It was a mostly fun, three-day trip to Hollywood. The not-so-fun part was visiting Claire, who was battling the Big C, which I wish someone would figure out how to diminish to the little c.

  “You know what cheered me up during that crappy chemo time?” she asked, fondling the stubble where her tangled mane once sprung. “Watching footage I shot of you all at the Swan Theater. Why didn’t I ever make a movie about that?”

  “Guess you were too busy making Without Papers and What’s the Matter with Men?” I said, citing just two of her many award-winning documentaries.

  “When I get my strength back, I’m going to make a movie of The Sorta Late Show. Who knows? Maybe it’ll revive your comedy career—or better yet—maybe somebody’ll offer you your own TV talk show.”

  “Which you’ll direct.”

  Claire’s laugh was weak in volume but full in spirit.

  “They wouldn’t know what hit ’em.”

  THE FUN PART WAS STAYING WITH SOLANGE and the backyard barbecue she hosted the last night for some old friends.

  “He’s his mother’s son,” said Frank, as we watched Loren execute a pretty swan dive into the pool. We were standing at the picnic table, loading our plates up with seconds.

  “And look at the Facebook friends,” he said, nodding at my daughter and his son flirting with one another. “Looks like they get along pretty well off-line.”

  “I love that they stay in touch,” I said. “Lily says they even write letters to each other now and then.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Frank’s wife, Paula. “The kind with stamps? I had no idea Nate even knew how to write a letter, let alone mail it.”