“Oh pooh,” I said, “to you. Nothing wrong with a little ambivalence.”
“Yeah,” Spike said. “There is.”
Chapter 23
I sat in Dr. John Melvin’s office, looking like a perfect doofus in pale lip gloss, a black wig, wraparound sunglasses, and one of those adorable hats that models wear in magazine ads, where the brim turns up in the front. The hat solidified the doofus look. But Melvin had seen me in my natural stunning blonde mode, so silly as I felt, a disguise seemed sensible. Sunny Randall, woman of a thousand faces. I was using my real first name and my former married name. I was Sonya Burke.
Melvin sat sideways at his desk wearing charcoal slacks and cordovan shoes, a blue blazer, a blue-and-red striped tie, and a blue shirt.
“Would you care to remove your glasses?” Dr. Melvin said.
I sat on the edge of my chair with my knees together and my hands folded in my lap. I shook my head.
“It is often useful,” he said, “for the therapist to see the patient’s eyes.”
Still sitting stiffly, I shook my head again and looked down at my folded hands. I wasn’t as ill at ease as I looked, but I was more ill at ease than I had expected to be.
“Of course,” he said. “Whatever is comfortable.”
Neither of us said anything for a little while. If it made Melvin uncomfortable, he didn’t show it. I shifted a little in my chair. I wasn’t acting. I was uncomfortable. Which was odd. I’ve done undercover work before. I had certainly dealt with more dangerous people than John Melvin, M.D.
I had on jeans and tan hiking boots and a black tee shirt. I had bought a shapeless, loose-fitting hip-length black wool jacket to complement my hat and wig, and I wore my gun near the small of my back under the coat.
“I’m divorced,” I said.
Melvin cocked his head a little as if that were interesting.
“Oh?” he said.
I was quiet. He was quiet.
After a while Melvin said, “How do you feel about being divorced?”
“Sad.”
“What makes you sad?”
I looked at him.
“Being divorced,” I said.
“What about being divorced?”
“Excuse me?”
I felt some annoyance. Couldn’t this jerk understand English?
“What about the divorce makes you sad?”
“I miss Richie,” I said.
Melvin nodded again and leaned back a little in his swivel chair and leaned his chin into his half-closed right hand. The room was very quiet.
“I’ve dated a lot of other men, and I’ve liked them, I’ve liked some of them very much.”
I could hear no cars passing. No leaf blowers blowing, no dogs barking, no water running. The stillness was a little daunting. Melvin blended right into it.
“But I never loved any of them,” I said. “Enough.”
“Enough to sleep with?” Melvin said.
His eyes were recessed and dark and I could almost feel them resting on me.
“Yes.”
“But not enough to marry.”
“No.”
Melvin kept his eyes on me, his chin on his hand. I was aware of my own breathing.
“Tell me about the divorce,” Melvin said after a while.
“We kept… I don’t know exactly. We couldn’t live together. We kept trying to fix each other.”
“Were you compatible sexually?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still see one another?”
“Yes. Actually we get along much better than when we were married.”
“Are you still intimate?”
“Occasionally,” I said.
Melvin nodded again and waited. He seemed as if he could wait comfortably for the full fifty minutes. I almost smiled. I wondered what would happen if I sat silent for the entire session.
“Whose idea is that?”
“I suppose it’s mutual,” I said.
“That’s always best,” he said.
I thought for a moment I saw something flicker in his face. Then it was gone. The session ended and I went back to my car feeling odd and a little light-headed. Who was investigating whom?
Chapter 24
“Are you prepared to fly?” Melanie Joan asked me.
“Yes.”
“And you’re not afraid? After September eleventh?”
“I was afraid before September eleventh,” I said.
“I know,” Melanie Joan said. “I am too, but I can’t live the life I lead if I don’t fly.”
I nodded.
“They want us to come to LA for meetings,” Melanie Joan said.
“They?”
“Murray and Hal, they’re trying to sell the project.”
“Sell it?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you had already sold it to them.”
“I agreed to be partners with them,” Melanie Joan said. “So they don’t have to buy the rights.”
I had the feeling that she thought it amazing that I knew so little about filmmaking.
“But we still need financing and distribution,” Melanie Joan said.
“So you have meetings with people who can do that,” I said.
“And we pitch them the project,” Melanie Joan said.
I nodded. “Which is why they call it…”
“A pitch meeting,” we said in unison.
Even I had heard of pitch meetings.
“And you think Melvin will follow you out there?”
“He may, I don’t know. In any event I’d like you with me.”
“Because I’m such a good time?” I said.
“Because there’s something about you that makes me braver.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes.”
“That’s very nice,” I said.
“It’s not meant to be nice,” Melanie Joan said. “It’s simply the truth.”
“Well,” I said. “I wish it were working better for me.”
“Nonsense,” Melanie Joan said.
“Nonsense?”
“I know you are being wry and self-effacing,” Melanie Joan said. “But you know perfectly well the things you’re capable of, and bravery is one of them. You are slim and cute and tougher than a boiled shoe.”
“You understand me that well?” I said.
I wasn’t sure she knew me well enough to have that much confidence in her judgment of me, even if it was flattering.
“I can’t write,” Melanie Joan said. “But I can think.”
“Damn,” I said. “You do Melanie Joan so well that sometimes I forget there’s someone else inside there.”
Melanie Joan inclined her head and accepted her due.
“I don’t miss all that much,” she said.
We were having dinner in a new restaurant called Blu in the new Sports Club/LA that had gone up on the corner of Tremont and Boylston.
“So why don’t they call this Sports Club/Boston?” I said.
“It would lack panache,” Melanie Joan said. “Will you fly with me to Los Angeles?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 25
Brian Kelly called me while I was in the initial planning stage of packing.
“DMV says that the owner of the Porsche Boxster you were looking at is Dirk Beals, lives in Boston on Mt. Vernon Street.”
“That’s locked right into the computer,” I said.
“You using computers now,” Kelly said.
“I was referring to my brain,” I said.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot about your brain.”
“Well, don’t,” I said.
“It’s just that I was interested in accessing other, ah, facets of your self.”
“And, as a I recall,” I said, “you succeeded.”
“Was it good for you, too?”
“Oh shut up,” I said. “Thanks for the help with DMV.”
As I hung up I could hear Kelly chuckling.
My cloth
es were organized in carefully laid-out categories, on hangers, spread on the bed, over the backs of chairs. Rosie lay among them with her nose on her paws and her eyes that looked like watermelon seeds moving as I moved. She always watched me like that. I knew it was because she loved me, and I knew it was also because there was always a chance that I might find a ball and throw it for her. Love is rarely unadulterated.
Packing was one of the several things about me Richie never understood. He thought packing meant putting his shaving kit in a carry-on suitcase, along with some clean shirts and underwear. I was mostly packed when I had decided what to bring. Putting the actual selections into an actual suitcase was only a finishing flourish. The weather in LA this day and the day before had been in the high seventies and sunny. It could rain, of course. And sometimes, I knew, when it was dark and rainy it could be a little chilly. I shuffled some outerwear around. We might eat out in elegant restaurants, but, as best I could remember, elegant restaurants in LA did not evoke elegant attire. Except for some. And I had to give serious thought to what one wore to a pitch meeting, when one was, more or less, only the bodyguard.
Mt. Vernon Street was the kind of address where you would expect to run into someone named Dirk Beals, who drove a Boxster. When I got back from LA I could go and sit outside his house for a while. Sooner or later, as my father had taught me, you learn something.
I was finally down to the decision between black leather pants and a charcoal skirt and jacket. I stared at them. Rosie stared at me. I took in some air and finally, sadly, took the skirt and jacket to my closet and hung them back up. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake.
In the morning after I had gone, Richie would come and pick Rosie up. I went to the kitchen counter to write him a note. I knew he knew how to take care of Rosie. He used to live with Rosie and me. But I had to write a note every time and remind him of what she ate and when and how much and who the vet was and where I could be reached in an emergency. One of the compulsions of motherhood. I had a glass of wine while I wrote the note. While I sipped my wine I wrote out carefully which ball Rosie most liked to chase, and when was the best time to take her out, and not to let her chase her tail too much, and what day I’d be back for her.
When I was done I poured another glass of wine. I reread the note. Then I got up and took my wineglass and walked down the loft to where my easel was set up under the skylight, where it caught the sunlight in the morning. I was painting the Weeks Footbridge, and I was maybe half done. Maybe the brushlines needed to be coarser. I drank some more wine and looked at my painting for a while. It was still incomplete, but it was coming.
Writing the note to Richie about shared custody of Rosie wasn’t just compulsive motherhood. I knew it was also a simulation of connected domesticity. I was re-creating something that may never have been.
And might never be.
Or might.
Chapter 26
Melanie Joan’s West Coast agent, Tony Gault, joined us at Buckboard Productions on the Paramount lot, watching, with a hint of amusement, I thought, through small eyeglasses with round black frames. He was tall and slim with a sort of sharp face, wearing pressed jeans and a gray cashmere tee shirt under a black cashmere jacket. His dark hair was thick, slightly longer than most. When he ran a hand through it, which, I noticed, he did frequently, the wave fell right back in place. Every woman I’ve ever known would kill someone to get hair like that. Tony Gault seemed to take it for granted.
Tony and I were at opposite ends of a semicircle, which also included Hal Race, Murray Gottlieb, and Melanie Joan. Sitting on a couch to one side of us, with her shoes off and her legs tucked up under her, was a slightly plump young woman named Mandy, and, at the epicenter of all this, seated in a wing chair at the center of all attention, was a kid named Cash Resnick.
“Cash and I really love your work,” Mandy was saying. “When we heard you were coming in we were very excited. Everybody was, around here.”
Cash’s adolescent face showed no emotion. I wondered if he shaved yet. Maybe he was old enough, his hair was receding. He wore what was left slicked straight back smooth against his small skull, and gathered into something that looked like the tail from a very small pony. He wore an NYPD tee shirt and pale blue jeans that he had apparently put on straight from the dryer. There were even a couple of small carefully tattered holes. For footwear he wore some elaborate running shoes.
“Would you care for something to drink?” Mandy said. “Coffee? Soft drink? Water?”
None of us did. Mandy looked at Cash. Cash nodded slightly. His youth fascinated me. If he shaved, how come his sideburns didn’t square off?
“Well,” Mandy said, “perhaps you’d like to tell us why you’re here?”
“Well,” Hal Race said, “as most people know, I’ve been a big fan of Melanie’s work since day one. And when Vagabond Heart came out I knew I had to play Aaron Lassiter.”
Resnick sat in blank immobility. It was as if Hal Race had not spoken. Hal Race glanced at Mandy and she smiled and nodded. Desperate to hear more.
“So I got ahold of Murray, and he got ahold of Tony, and we lucked out. Melanie said yes. And here we are.”
No one said anything. I saw Tony Gault looking at me across the silent half circle. His eyes looked as if he might be smiling. I met his look. Wasn’t this hideous. Cash continued to sit and contemplate eternity. Maybe he had died and they didn’t want us to know.
“Maybe you could tell us a little of the story,” Mandy said.
“Sure would,” Hal said. “And Melanie, you jump in anywhere if you think I’m getting it wrong.”
“I will,” Melanie Joan said.
“Okay. Aaron Lassiter is the president of a fabulously successful international private security firm and comes home to find his wife of six months, Heather, has disappeared. I see maybe Gwyneth, but it might be the place to cast an unknown, do a little star making, so to speak.”
Cash was passionately unaffected by all of this. Mandy nodded vigorously. She was delighted.
“So Lassiter turns out the full resources of his security agency to find Heather…”
I had read the book, and I had sat through the rehearsal in our suite at the Beverly Wilshire, while Melanie Joan and Gottlieb and Hal shaped the pitch. I looked at Tony Gault again. He seemed composed and something more, maybe the tilt of his head, something suggested that he found everything amusing. I crossed my eyes at him. He winked. Hal’s pitch finally wound down, with Cash continuing in deep catatonia.
Mandy said, “That’s great. The title might have to be changed. Warners did a film a couple of years ago called Vagabond, and it tanked badly.”
“What’s in a name?” Hal said.
Cash spoke.
“You have a script?” he said.
From the sound of his voice he might never shave. Hal Race looked at Gottlieb.
“We’re hoping you’ll commission one,” Gottlieb said.
Cash didn’t say anything else.
“Well, damn, look at the time. Cash has another meeting at two. This sounds very exciting. Let us think on it and talk, and we’ll get back to you. Call you, Murray? Or Tony.”
“Either one would be fine,” Gottlieb said.
Cash stood and turned and left the office. Mandy got up and held the door open and smiled at us as we trooped out.
Chapter 27
Hal, being a movie star, was too important to go, and Gottlieb had another pitch. But Melanie Joan and Tony Gault and I went across Melrose Avenue to a Mexican place called Lucy’s El Adobe to have lunch and debrief. It wasn’t crowded at 2:15 in the afternoon and we got a big booth for ourselves.
“The margaritas are to die for,” Tony said. “Shall we get a pitcher?”
“I may need a pitcher just for me,” Melanie Joan said.
The walls of Lucy’s were covered with celebrity photographs.
“Who’s that guy?” I said.
“That’s Bill Strout, old CBS newsman.”
Tony studied the picture for a minute.
“No idea,” he said.
The margaritas came. I had a small sip of one. It was to die for.
“Good pitch,” Tony said.
“We didn’t say anything,” Melanie Joan said. “Except Hal giving a plot summary.”
“That’s probably the best approach,” Tony said.
“And for God’s sake what is it with the stone face on that little twerp in the tee shirt.”
“That’s his pitch style. He wants people to think he’s formidable.”
“Formidable?” I said.
Tony smiled again.
“My ex-husband would fall laughing to the ground at the very sight of him,” I said.
“Not if he were trying to sell a project,” Tony said.
“Even if he were.”
“Ex-husband,” Tony said.
“Yes.”
“Tony’s not married either,” Melanie Joan said.
“That makes three of us,” I said.
Lunch came, and pretty soon another pitcher of margaritas.
“Tony used to be married,” Melanie Joan said.
“God bless the past tense,” Tony said.
If the margaritas were having an effect on him, I couldn’t see it. They were having an effect on me. And I liked it.
“You’re divorced?” I said.
“From a Southern California film-business bubblehead,” Tony said.
“Whom you once thought well enough of to marry.”
Tony grinned. “That’s because I too am a Southern California film-business bubblehead,” he said.
“But cute,” Melanie Joan said.
“Oh, yes,” Tony said. “Very cute.”
“So what will be the next step, ah, pitchwise,” I said.
“We see Grady Wilson at Universal, tomorrow at ten.”
“No,” I said. “I meant this one that we just did.”
“Oh.” Melanie Joan shrugged. “Probably nothing.”
“No need to be negative here,” Tony said.
“After a lovely chat with Resnick?” Melanie Joan said. “And Mandy chirp chirp? It would depress a mortician.”
Shrink Rap Page 7
