Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  He smiled, and shook hands.

  The prescription was like magic. He took the pill and his heart didn’t pound.

  Perry felt calm now. He felt even more calm when he met with Mona Halsted. Why hadn’t he thought of her before? Well, the time just hadn’t been right. When he met her that glittery night at the Vees’ his head was all into “First Year” and his newly hatched feature fantasy with Vaughan. When Jane brought her up again on that last walk on the beach at Venice, Perry still was clinging to the feature dream as an immediate possibility, the jackpot that was just around the corner. Now he was more realistic. More in the mood for Mona. She was, after all, not only a sensitive and sympathetic person, she actually knew and admired his work. Oh, was he in the mood for Mona.

  He felt ashamed that he had put her down for seeming so motherly. Right now, he would take all the motherly warmth and comfort he could get. And she exuded it. She made him feel secure, almost at peace, simply by being in her presence. She looked, if anything, more motherly now than she had at the party—or at least more traditionally motherly, in the old-fashioned sense. She did not look so much like Sada Thompson playing the mother in “Family” now; without Ms. Thompson’s bright lipstick, she reminded Perry more of one of those Norman Rockwell mothers. Her makeup was so faint and artful as to seem like a natural blush. Her smile was serene, reassuring. Perry would not have been at all surprised if she had reached out onto the air-conditioner outside her office window and pulled in a fresh apple pie.

  The story she wanted to do as a TV movie was a story about death.

  Perry perked up. At least that was serious. It was something in fact he felt very in tune with these days.

  It was not about a man, but that didn’t lessen Perry’s interest. It was the story of a young woman who learns her father is dying of cancer. She has never been close to him, yet she sacrifices not only her career by leaving her important job with no advance notice, she breaks off an engagement with a man she loves, all in order to be with her father during his last days.

  Before she continued, Mona said, “I have waited for the right person to do this story. It’s very important to me. The fact that you might be the one to write it would be like a dream come true.”

  “Thank you,” Perry said.

  He felt all right about himself for the first time in a long time. He felt almost as worthwhile as he had before he came to Hollywood.

  Mona stood and came around her desk and pulled a chair up next to him.

  “I want to confess to you,” she said, “the real reason I want to do this story.”

  “I’d like to know,” Perry said.

  Mona nodded, and took a deep breath.

  “I was born and grew up in a small town in Nebraska,” she said. “I was an only child. The daughter of a judge. He was a stern man, remote and godlike. I was afraid of him. I clung to my mother. When I went off to college, my father developed a terminal cancer. He asked me to come home, to be with him in his last months of life. I would have had to take a semester off college. Leave my boyfriend. My sorority sisters. My plans. I was frightened. I refused. I turned away from my own father when he was dying.”

  Mona took out a handkerchief. She wiped at her eyes, then blew her nose.

  “What I want to do now,” she said, “is tell the story of a daughter who made the decision I wish that I had made myself. A daughter who sacrifices her own wishes and desires for the sake of comforting her father, even though she’s never been close to him. Of course, she will become close to him—in our story. It would be like a kind of atonement, I suppose. It would be like showing others a better way to behave than I did. And it would, most of all, I hope, be a tribute to my father.”

  When she finished, Perry had to wipe his own eyes.

  “It would be an honor,” he said, “to try to do justice to that story.”

  To make the situation even better, the story had been presold to Judd Wizener, known as one of the most perceptive and kindly men in television, the head of TV and movies for his network. Mona was sure he’d be delighted to have Perry as the writer.

  Perry called Ravenna and told her he had found “the perfect wave.”

  The deal was struck quickly. He would only get $35,000, in three payments, but that was not the point. The point was at last he had a subject worthy of a real writer. It fit something he had forgotten, some words of Yeats about doing only those things you could be proud of, and count all else “extravagance of breath.”

  Yes.

  Now all he had to do was write a treatment for approval by the network before he began the actual script.

  Perry got right down to work.

  It was hard. It was hard to capsulize a real story like this, hard to put it in TV terms. He found himself struggling. Damn. If he couldn’t do this one with all the circumstances right he might as well give up.

  He smoked a little grass, but that didn’t help.

  He knew that Mona was anxiously waiting to hear, to have him get going on her dream project.

  Finally, one night in frustration, he remembered Archer Mellis’s original words of advice.

  “Don’t even think about television.”

  Yes! That was it, that was the key. He was worrying too much about pleasing the preconceived pap notions of network people. That was crazy. This was going to be read by the sympathetic eyes of Mona and then of the kindly Judd Wizener.

  Perry had a beer and went to his typewriter. He poured out his deepest feelings about this story, not just the plot but the heart of it, his vision of it. He wrote all night, stopping only to have more beers, but not getting drunk, just keeping going, just like the old days. It was like staying up with a great story that ran its own course, that wrote itself!

  At dawn he had twenty-two pages that were like a letter to Mona. He showered, shaved, and took it in person to her office. He heard back from her two hours later.

  She loved it.

  She was sending it over to the network right away.

  When Perry hung up the phone he smiled and took a deep breath, then another. He felt he could really breathe again. He went to the kitchen and made a cup of instant coffee, feeling clean and sharp. He should have been bushed, but he felt more alive than he had for months. He didn’t want to go to bed. He wanted to do something, wanted to take some kind of action, now that he felt capable of such a thing.

  He called Ned Gurney. He had missed him enormously, but feared if he called after the news that Ned finally got his feature going, it would sound like the worst kind of sucking up. Now that Perry had something hot of his own in the works he felt it was all right to call Ned. He invited him to lunch at the place where Ned had first taken him when they met, the restaurant in Westwood that reminded Perry of the Copley Plaza in Boston.

  Ned was gracious, as always. Perry apologized to him about breaking his word on the option of “The Springtime Women,” and Ned admitted that it had hurt, but he had put it behind him. Perry said he didn’t think anything was going to come of it anyway. Poetic justice, maybe, for his being so underhanded in the greedy effort to get it made. Ned merely shrugged.

  “You know what that piece should really be?” Ned asked.

  “Maybe it should just be what it is,” Perry said. “A short story.”

  “Maybe. But in dramatic terms, it really should be a play.”

  “You think it could be?”

  “Of course. You could do a beautiful job with it. And on the stage, you as the writer would really have control.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Perry said. “What an amazing thing it sounds like. It’s almost worth writing a play just to have that experience.”

  “Especially after your recent experience, I bet.”

  “Yes. But now I’ve really got my teeth into something good.”

  He told Ned about Mona and the story of the daughter whose father is dying, and Ned was very pleased that Perry had something of substance to work on, and a good producer to work with.
/>   “I hope someday,” Perry said, “I might even get to work with you again.”

  “I’d like that,” Ned said. “Who knows, we might even do something back East, on Broadway.”

  “You think you might go back?”

  “I miss it,” Ned said. “‘Spoons’ is going well, and of course I have high hopes for it, but I think I’ll be able to use a change of pace when it’s finally finished.”

  Perry nodded. He didn’t want to ask anything more specific or try to make any real plans that might seem impossible, for he didn’t want to break the spell. It was as if, in that room with its Boston aura, they were temporarily back East, up in the right-hand corner of the national weather map, where snow fell softly in winter and leaves turned red in the fall.

  “Thanks,” Ned said when they parted, “this was civilized.”

  Perry paced the apartment and drank pots of black coffee, waiting to hear from Mona about the reaction from the network. A week passed. He was tempted to put a little brandy in his coffee, but he kept himself dry during the day, in shape, ready for the word to come down, ready to be told to “go for it.”

  When Mona finally called, it was not to give him the go sign, but to tell him the network wanted to have a meeting about the project.

  Perry immediately stiffened.

  “Didn’t Judd Wizener like it?”

  “Perry, he adored it.”

  “So why do we have to meet with him? Does he want to talk casting already?”

  “Dear, we aren’t meeting with Judd.”

  “Why not? I thought he adored the project.”

  “He’s not with the network any longer, dear. Evidently, this treatment of yours is the last thing he read.”

  “My God! What happened to him?”

  “He’s gone into independent production.”

  Perry sat down.

  “I thought he was strong. I thought he was entrenched.”

  “Things happen,” said Mona.

  “So who are we seeing? Who’s in charge?”

  “JoyAnn Wales.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “A brilliant young woman, I understand. Came to the network three years ago from Boeing.”

  “From Boeing Aircraft? What is she, a test pilot?”

  “An engineer. Absolutely brilliant, I’m told.”

  “What the hell do engineers know about stories?”

  “Now Perry. We mustn’t be defensive before we’ve even taken our meeting.”

  “Well what did she say about it? Did she like the treatment? Did she get the point?”

  “I’m sure she adored it. All I really know is that she has some notes.”

  “Holy God.”

  Some notes.

  Some suggestions, no doubt, on how to improve his fragile story from a hotshot young woman aerospace engineer.

  When he hung up, Perry poured a tumbler of wine.

  JoyAnn Wales was a small, physically delicate young woman with a voice like sandpaper. Her blond hair was worn in a feathery bob, and her dress, a gossamer sort of thing that added to the impression that she might be blown away by the first breeze through the palm trees, was a wash of soft pastels. But her voice anchored her. Her voice was in a constant state of irritation, as if inflamed.

  “When is this thing supposed to take place?” she asked harshly.

  “Right now,” said Perry.

  “We see it as universal,” cooed Mona, “but in a contemporary scene and setting.”

  JoyAnn picked up the script and started flipping through it, slapping back the pages as if they were bad children.

  “They sound like they’re wearing hoopskirts,” she said.

  Perry could feel his pulse picking up.

  “What gives you that idea?” he asked.

  “This daughter—for Christ’s sake, she leaves her job, forgets her career, dumps her man, to go play nursemaid to this grungy old fart?”

  “That’s her father,” Mona pointed out.

  “Is that supposed to explain why she’s such a wimp?” JoyAnn demanded.

  “She’s supposed to be a decent person,” Perry said. “Evidently you find that hard to identify with.”

  “What Perry means,” Mona said, “is that we’re trying to portray a young woman whose loyalty to her father makes her sacrifice some of her own desires of the moment.”

  “If she wants to make it with him, we might have a story here. The last incest piece we did got a forty-three share.”

  “Perhaps Perry and I can think this through again, with your notes in mind,” Mona said.

  JoyAnn stood up.

  “The bottom line is,” she said, “I just don’t know where these people are coming from.”

  She tossed the treatment back to Perry. It fell to the floor in front of him. He did not pick it up. He got to his feet, feeling at the same time a fierce anger and a wild sense of freedom.

  His heart was beating wildly, even though he had not only taken his beta blocker before the meeting, he had also popped a Valium he’d borrowed from Ronnie just for good measure. He felt that his pounding heart was a good sign, a sign he was still alive, still human. He considered his pounding heart to be a triumph of nature over chemistry, even over Hollywood.

  “I can tell you where I am coming from,” he said to JoyAnn Wales. “I am coming from Vermont. And I am finally going back. Now. In the nick of time.”

  JoyAnn looked puzzled, and turned to Mona.

  “I’m afraid he doesn’t get the picture,” the sharp young executive said.

  “Oh, I’m afraid he does,” said Mona, standing up herself now.

  Perry placed his hands on JoyAnn’s desk, leaned toward her, and said, with pleasure and fervor, a single word:

  “Ciao.”

  Outside the building, he hugged Mona.

  “You can have what I wrote,” he said. “Free of charge. Maybe you can make something of it, somewhere else. Or here. Wherever. Let me know if I can do anything.”

  Mona smiled.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Give my love to Vermont. And to Jane.”

  He turned and started for his car and Mona called after him.

  “Perry?”

  “Yes?”

  “God speed.”

  He had never heard anyone say that before.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Perry called American Airlines and booked a tourist-class seat on the next available flight to Boston.

  “Do you wish to make a return reservation?” the ticket person asked.

  “No. This is one-way,” he said. “No return.”

  When he spoke the words he suddenly felt as if lead weights were lifted off him. He felt he could fly to Boston without even getting on the plane, just by walking out the door and taking the first step East.

  Despite this new feeling of freedom, Perry did not yet have the courage to call Jane. It took all the chutzpah he could muster to call Al Cohen and ask if he could stay with him and Rachel for at least a night; on the floor, anywhere.

  Perry felt guilty that Al wasn’t even angry. In fact, Al wasn’t even surprised, but he seemed very pleased.

  The Cohens’ living room looked to Perry like a longed-for safe harbor.

  First he cried.

  Then he launched into breast-beating tirades against his own phony behavior, his betrayal of their friendship. This eloquent self-flagellation was stifled only by Rachel’s sticking a beer and a sandwich into his hands. Once Perry’s mouth was full, Al shut him up with what he said was the final word on the subject, courtesy of Robert Frost:

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

  They have to take you in.”

  “Home is also the place,” said Rachel, “where you have to listen to all the Robert Frost that is quoted without complaining to the management.”

  Perry winced, remembering that night an eon or so ago before he went West, when after a wonderful dinner and too much brandy he yelled at Al for quoting someth
ing of Frost, bitching that the poet and his observations were out of fashion, or some such arrogant nonsense. It sounded to him now like something the Vees would have said.

  “Will you forgive me?” he asked. “You have every reason to turn me out in the cold.”

  “But to quote Mr. Frost yet again,” said Rachel, reaching out and giving Perry a tweak on the nose, “home is ‘something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’”

  “I love it,” Perry laughed. “The quote, and being here.”

  He spent the first night on the Cohens’ couch. The next morning he had coffee and juice and bacon and eggs and toast and then he walked alone to the woods that bordered the house where he once had lived.

  In the woods he inhaled the smells of spring. He sank to his knees. There was a crocus just beginning to bud and he leaned to it, touched it, and knew, in a surge of comprehension that was almost like a blow: this is the gold.

  He bowed his head. The day was fresh and warm, and sunlight lay across the hard ground. Perry had an urge to get closer to the earth. He remembered Lon Ridings, the actor, and how he had disrobed down to his jockey shorts and pressed his flesh to the dry dirt alongside Ned Gurney’s patio. He knew how the man must have felt, how he must have wanted to burrow on down into his own grave. That was not what Perry felt now. He did not want to take off his clothes, he simply wanted to lie flat out on the earth and dig his fingers into the soil.

  He could feel his heart beat. It was not pounding any more. It did not feel as if it might explode and burst right through his chest. It was making a lovely rhythm against the earth. He lay there a long time, and then raised up on his elbows. Slowly, he crawled to the edge of the woods and peered at his old house.

  A woman walked out the door and looked toward him, but she didn’t see him yet. He wanted to go to her. He wondered if that were possible. First he stood up. Then he put one foot in front of the other. He felt wobbly, like a colt. He took another step. Simple things. He was learning them all over. He was doing something miraculous. He was moving toward the woman he loved.

  He was walking.

  About the Author

  Dan Wakefield (b. 1932) is the author of the bestselling novels Going All the Way and Starting Over, which were both adapted into feature films. His memoirs include New York in the Fifties, which was made into a documentary film of the same name, and Returning: A Spiritual Journey, praised by Bill Moyers as “one of the most important memoirs of the spirit I have ever read.” Wakefield created the NBC prime time series James at 15, and wrote the screenplay for Going All the Way, starring Ben Affleck. He edited and wrote the introduction for Kurt Vonnegut Letters as well as If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Vonnegut’s Advice to the Young. Visit Wakefield online at www.danwakefield.com and www.vonnegutsoldestlivingfriend.com.