Miss Match

by Leslie Carroll

  “Buy the idea from you or buy the Brownie Points from you?” Kathryn asked.

  “We’re trying to figure out which makes more sense now. If they buy the concept and the recipe from me, there are legal issues that we haven’t covered yet. It may make more sense for the time being for them to buy the actual baked Brownie Points, which also turns my kitchen into a factory—and that isn’t exactly what I bargained for either.”

  “So how does Dan figure into all of this?”

  “He doesn’t. But he wants to. His point of view is that I can afford not to work; I should stay home and take care of Johanna and the one on the way . . . take care of my health.” She rubbed her growing belly.

  Kathryn furrowed her brow. “That’s noble, I suppose.”

  “Noble, but selfish, too. When you think about it. You can choose to see his opinion as either chivalric or Cro-Magnon. We just had this huge fight. It’s all about him. Instead of being thrilled for my success, he says I’m emasculating him by wanting to return to work. It makes him feel . . . I don’t know . . . to be the sole breadwinner.”

  “Isn’t there room for compromise here? He can win the bread and let you make the brownies.”

  “That’s not as funny as you think it is, Kitty. It’s more than his feeling threatened that in a perfect world I could be the next Mrs. Fields. Dan just doesn’t get it that I’m going stir crazy wandering around nine rooms high above Park Avenue with no one but a two-year-old for company most of the day.” Eleanor emitted a sigh comprised of one part frustration and three parts exasperation. “Dan’s not home. He’s always out. There’s always some emergency tummy tuck or eye lift or liposuction he has to go perform.”

  “And what did he say to that?”

  “He said ‘where do you think we get the money for our lifestyle?’ ” Eleanor intoned, goofily mimicking her husband’s voice.

  “So, Dan wouldn’t even discuss it with you like an adult?”

  The tension still hadn’t left Eleanor’s voice. “ ‘What’s to discuss,’ he said. He actually chalked up my cabin fever to pregnancy hormones! That’s when I accused him of having no bedside manner. I also reminded him that the fact that I once made a respectable income didn’t seem to emasculate him when we were dating. Can I have a cup of tea?”

  “Maybe you need a hug first.” Kathryn reached over and held her younger sister. “Jeez. And I always thought you had it all together.” She stroked Eleanor’s hair.

  Feeling safe, Eleanor finally broke down. “I need time to figure things out,” she confessed in a choked voice. “I mean, is this symptomatic of everything that’s going on in my marriage? Is it in trouble for real?”

  Kathryn kissed her sister on the forehead. “You’ll be able to work it out,” she soothed.

  “When did I lose control?” Eleanor sobbed into Kathryn’s velvet tunic.

  “Look. I’m not an expert on relationships— obviously—but maybe this isn’t the beginning of the end. Maybe, in some sick, twisted, codependent way, the fight with Dan was what you both needed to get a lot of stuff out in the open so you can move on to a healthier place in your marriage. Where you feel more like equal partners.”

  “In the meantime . . . oh, I forgot to even ask—is Walker still here?”

  “He was asked to hit the road last night, as a matter of fact.”

  “Then if it’s not too much trouble, can I stay here for a while? I’m too pissed off at Dan to go back home right now. I sent Johanna’s overnight bag to the parental unit, so she’s got a few changes of clothes. She’ll be thrilled to stay with Nana and Abba for a bit. She’s such a smart kid. ‘Mommy’s having a meltdown,’ she said when we were going down in the elevator.”

  Kathryn shook her head.

  “Was that a ‘no’?” Eleanor asked, worried.

  “No, it was an ‘I can’t believe what a messed-up past twelve hours it’s been.’ Yeah, of course you can stay here,” Kathryn said, giving her sister a brief shoulder massage. She smoothed her hand over Eleanor’s hair and moved toward the kitchen. “Now, I’ll make you that cup of tea you asked for.”

  “You blew it, bro. Big-time.” Josh lifted the plastic tarp from Rushie’s couch. “Jesus. Kathryn’s right. This is a boring piece of furniture. I feel like I’m committing some sort of sacrilege here by removing the Saran Wrap. I hope your mother won’t be pissed, but this is offending my aesthetic sensibilities.”

  Walker looked glum, wiggling his toes inside his white sweat socks, his feet propped up on an uncovered corner of the glass and chrome coffee table. “Rushie’s got her mind on another form of prophylactic at the moment. She’s on a date.”

  “Talk about getting back on the horse, Bear.”

  “She’s terrified of being alone.”

  “And you?” Josh cracked open a bottle of Rolling Rock, and looked for a place to deposit the bottle top. “Face it. You’re acting like a schmuck! It doesn’t take Freud to figure out that you, ‘Mr. Loner,’ deliberately create situations that will ensure your solitary state. You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe your mother had something in mind when she took off with Ludovic and left you minding the store.”

  “You mean apart from maternal and professional irresponsibility?”

  “No, bro. Maybe she wanted you to gain some firsthand knowledge of all the work it really takes to make a relationship happen in the first place, and then, to maintain it. Maybe she had a clairvoyant feeling that you would meet a nice girl and fall in love, and want to settle down after all.”

  “My mother doesn’t think in coherent thought patterns, Josh. She’s very European in that ‘if it feels good do it’ kind of way. And forgive me for being dense, but how did we get from Rushie’s screwed-up love life to my own?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Walker held out his hand for Josh’s trash, and took the crumpled metal cap into the kitchen. “Maybe I’ve let this thing get way out of hand.”

  “Bear, I have no idea what went through your brain when you brought a chick you want to bang to the apartment of the woman who, out of the goodness of her heart, and against her better judgment, was giving you a place to crash while your ceiling was being repaired. Kathryn’s your client, Bear. And you broke that doctor-patient kind of trust with her. Big-time. Face it. You made a big-ass mistake and you’ve got to fix it. My advice to you is to keep everything on a strictly professional level for a while.”

  Walker nodded, trying to convince himself to agree with Josh’s suggestion. “Six in the City owes her two more matches.”

  “So really pull the stops out for her. And if those two don’t work out, your contract with her is over, so take it from there.”

  “There’s only one thing that concerns me, Josh. What if she marries one of them?”

  “What do you care?” Josh asked provocatively. “You don’t want to marry anyone anyway. You’ll have another name on the company’s success roster.” He took a long swallow of beer, and looked at the bottle, chipping at the label with his fingernail before turning to his friend. “Moron.” He shook his head.

  It seemed like a long time before Walker replied. “Okay . . . Mr. Reverse Psychology. I admit it. I do care about Kitty. I messed up big-time and I want to make it up to her . . . and I think I know how to begin.” He beamed. It was as though a lightbulb had just gone on above his head. “I’m a man with a plan. Josh, in your grand and glorious experience as a gallery owner and art dealer, do you know how to find any Renaissance Fairetype craftspeople? I need to track down a very unusual objet d’art.”

  Chapter 20

  Bob Barton had knocked so gently on the door to Kathryn’s classroom that she wasn’t even aware of the principal’s presence until he poked his head inside the room. “Can I see you a minute, Ms. Lamb?”

  Kathryn excused herself from her ninth graders to speak with Barton in the doorway.

  “You’ve got a . . . visitor,” he told her in his customary dull intonation.

  “It’s
kind of a bad time,” Kathryn replied. She lowered her voice a notch or two. “I’ve just started a class and this is sort of, well . . . ‘short attention-span-theater,’ if you follow me.”

  Barton didn’t. He made a loud throat clearing gesture.

  “Can whoever it is wait for forty-five minutes?”

  Then she heard the unmistakable squeals of adolescent girls in lust.

  “I don’t think so . . .” Barton countered blandly. “You see—” He made a “come here” gesture with his hand that was about as frantic a movement as Kathryn had ever seen Briarcliff’s principal make, even since her own student days when Jordan O’Keeffe admitted to bestowing the school’s clerical staff with a batch of home-made— and hash-spiked—brownies. “I think you’ll want to see this person.”

  Kathryn noticed a crush of students forming behind the principal’s back. She opened the classroom door and the source of the excitement elbowed his way into the room. Kathryn’s drama class issued a collective gasp that it would have taken weeks to choreograph to such perfection. When she heard a thudding sound, Kathryn could have sworn that one of her freshmen had actually swooned.

  “Ohmigod, it’s him,” Lisette Mars breathed, stupified.

  “You certainly know how to make an entrance,” Kathryn stammered, trying to maintain her poise. Had she succeeded in convincing Barton in the previous millisecond that she had planned this little interruption all along? Probably not.

  Rick Byron entered the classroom, a calculated blend of modesty and cockiness in tight black jeans, a black designer T-shirt and an Armani sport coat. He looked like a Barney’s ad. Just inside the door, he gave Kathryn a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek that made a ‘mwanh’ smacking sound. Catcalls issued from both sides of the open door. Kathryn glared at the now-starstruck Bob Barton and motioned for him to dismiss the attendant throng flanking his rear, and to get the hell out of there.

  Before Rick could get too far inside the room, Kathryn pulled him aside. “I’ve got two words for you,” she hissed, trying to look as normal as possible under the circumstances. “Liz Smith.”

  “Uh . . . yeah,” the actor replied, shifting his weight from snakeskin boot to boot. “Look, I’m really sorry about that.”

  “Is this your idea of making it up to me? Or your manager’s? I’m just curious. I mean after all that Cristal, I didn’t even think you’d remember any of what you were blathering at dinner. And the paparazzo took a pretty flattering photo of me, so I don’t detest you quite as much as I really want to.”

  “Well, about making it up to you—yes. I mean no. This is my idea. In fact my manager tried to talk me out of it. I really meant what I said to you at Nebuchadnezzar,” he whispered. “Coming up here to shoot the breeze with one of your classes wasn’t bullshit. And, don’t get me wrong . . . although I don’t see why you shouldn’t . . . I mean from your perspective, it probably looks a bit . . . well.”

  “You’re not too articulate without a script, are you?” Kathryn asked him smugly. She hadn’t really had the chance to seethe and now she had the golden opportunity to stand up for herself. And on her turf.

  “I really liked you, Miss Kitty—I mean, I still like you . . . it just can’t be what—well, you know.”

  Their heads had been together in conversation long enough for the ninth grade class to start buzzing in whispers behind them.

  “What’s that cologne you’re wearing, by the way?” Kathryn asked the film star.

  “Green Irish Tweed. Creed makes it; my manager gets it for me at a little place on Christopher Street. He told me it was Cary Grant’s signature fragrance. And since journalists can’t resist comparing me to him, calling me the C.G. of the new millennium and all that, I figured I’d give them another reason.”

  “It’s . . . very . . . nice.” Kathryn was working overtime to suppress her hormones. Rick’s cologne did wonderful things to her libido. But to her surprise, it wasn’t Rick whose bones she was thinking about jumping, but Bear, even though it was the movie star’s scent that had shifted her pheromones into overdrive.

  Kathryn composed herself and turned to face her class. “Well, folks, for those of you who have been on Pluto for the past few years and therefore require an introduction, this is—”

  “Rick. Just call me Rick.” He lit up the room with the lopsided grin that had gotten him on every magazine cover from G.Q. to Rolling Stone to, ironically, Good Housekeeping in the past seven months.

  “Rick is here to talk to you guys about the business.”

  “Yup. That business they call ‘Show.’ ”

  If he didn’t stop grinning, those freshmen girls would lose their last brain cells.

  “Well, Rick, I’ll throw you to the wolves. Who’s got a question for Rick?” Every hand shot up. “Andrew?”

  Andrew picked at something on his desk and tried to look casual before he got up the gumption to look the celebrity in the eye. “Uh, did you really do Sandra Bullock?”

  “Next question,” Rick said, his face betraying nothing.

  “Uh, yeah, I have a follow-up question.”

  “Andrew,” Kathryn warned with a stern glance at the ninth grader.

  “Um, yeah. Is it true that you did Sharon Stone that time she played your stepmom?”

  “Andrew! Rick came here to talk about the business. About acting.”

  “Well, that’s what I meant, man. It didn’t look like you were acting in your love scenes with her. So, like you’re either really good or you were doing her, right?”

  Chloe shot her boyfriend a deadly look.

  “Okay. Let’s talk about the acting in those scenes,” Rick gamely said. “First of all, no matter how sexy a scene looks to you when you’re sitting in the movie theater shoveling popcorn into your mouth or making out with your girlfriend, the fact is that we actors are out there, mostly butt-naked, in front of all the crew and all these lights. It’s not really that glamorous. Or that sexy. And sometimes you have to contort yourself into some uncomfortable positions that feel really weird or unnatural, but when you see the scene on film, the perspective looks right. Also—and I gotta say this so you don’t think all us actors are geniuses—it’s the director and the editor and the guys who do the lighting who make us look so good up there.” Rick laughed.

  Tandy Newman raised her hand. “Do you have any formal acting training?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t actually. I’m what’s considered a ‘natural.’ At least that’s what my agent says.”

  There was a collective laugh.

  Kathryn took that as a nice opportunity to segue. “Well, why don’t we show Rick what happens in an acting class, then? Who’s ready to put their scenes from Shrew on their feet?”

  The class was silent as a morgue.

  “C’mon, guys, don’t be shy,” the film star prodded. “I want to see your stuff.”

  No one took the bait.

  “Why don’t you act for us?” Tandy asked.

  “Yeah! You and Ms. Lamb,” encouraged Lisette.

  “No,” Kathryn answered.

  “Awww. Why not?” some of the students groaned.

  Kathryn cocked her head and gave her class a phony perky smile. “Because I’m the teacher, that’s why. So I get to pick what we do! Rick’s never studied acting. He’s a natural. So he might like to check out the process. Scene study. Text analysis. Let’s go! Andrew, Chloe, get your butts up and put the Wooing Scene on its feet.”

  There was no movement from the two freshmen.

  Rick leaned over to Kathryn and whispered something to her. After a moment or two of reluctance, she nodded in agreement. “Okay kids,” she began. “You get your wish. But since Rick and I have never practiced the Wooing Scene together—” there were hoots from the class “—this will be a demonstration in cold-reading technique. In how to size up a scene in a millisecond and make bold choices, beat by beat.” She went over to her students and retrieved two copies of The Taming of the Shrew.

  “Now, those
of you who are serious about becoming professional actors will at one time or another encounter cold readings when you go to auditions. You won’t always be asked to do a monologue that you have practiced and practiced until you know it in your sleep.”

  “That happens in film all the time,” Rick added. “Sometimes you get a really short time to look over a scene, and if it’s just a few lines, you have to make a choice about what the character wants, even if you don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the script. You know, your whole character could be ‘I have that call on line two, Mr. Sanders.’ Or, if it’s a Schwarzenegger film, ‘Everybody get down! Now!!’ ”

  “Rick, maybe you could also show the kids how a professional actor does a monologue. Do you have anything memorized that you usually do?”

  The movie star shook his head. “I don’t do monologues for film auditions. Besides,” he added, all boyish charm, “when you’re in demand, people just call you—I rarely have to audition for anything. In fact, Harlan Josephson’s been on my shit list since he made me audition for I Know What You Did with the Babysitter!”

  The jaded freshmen’s eyes widened at his free and easy use of the expletive in the classroom. Kathryn elected to ignore it.

  “C’mon, act with Ms. Lamb,” Andrew demanded.

  “Are you up for this?” Kathryn asked her guest. What a great anecdote to tell the grandchildren. And it would be a much more PG-rated story than her other brush with Rick Byron’s greatness.

  The V.F.A. pulled Kathryn to one side of the room. “I’m really up for this cold-reading demo thing, but I’d rather not do Shakespeare , if you know what I mean. Leo was great as Romeo, but the Bard isn’t exactly my ‘for-tay,’ ” he said, sotto voce.

  “Tandy, what else are you working on besides Shrew?” Kathryn asked her most precocious preppie.

  The ninth grader delved into her knapsack and tossed her teacher a dog-eared script.

  “Thank you, Tandy. The Importance of Being Earnest. Not Shakespeare, but truly a classic.” Kathryn flipped through the script and handed it to Rick, indicated where the proposal scene between Jack and Gwendolen would begin and end.