2
TWO’S COMPANY
AND THEN THE PERFECT COUPLE, Pam and Paul, who first hooked up in college, co-writing operettas and co-founding a cabaret, went on to amaze their classmates by marrying in Reno six months before they even graduated, and finally, at a combined age of forty-three, set up shop in California as a comedy-writing duo. They were still only twenty-seven when NBC picked up their pilot for a series about suburban teen-agers with funny yesteryear hair styles and funny yesteryear teen difficulties. Every Wednesday night, for the next five seasons, tens of millions of smiling Americans watched the heart icon in the show’s closing credit (“A PAMELA BURGER ♥ PAUL MATHER CREATION”) twinkle once to the sound of a little chime. In joint appearances at their alma mater’s Career Day—Pam resembling a freckly Bartlett pear, Paul a cartoon scallion with well-gelled rootlets—the two of them dispensed encouragement to aspiring young writers. “Work hard, don’t compromise, never settle for the easy deal,” Pam said. “Failing that,” Paul said, “at least make sure the easy deal is for eight figures.” The happy couple, whose three Emmies had the effect of confirming the literary rightness of their relationship, retired from the show in 1998, sold their bungalow in Santa Monica, and bought a thirty-acre spread up in the mountains, because, as they quipped in joint interviews with their old home-town papers in North Carolina and Massachusetts, Paul had become psychologically incapable of remembering whether the “O” in “Michael Ovitz” was long or short and therefore couldn’t appear in public anymore.
At their mountain hideaway, to which, for a pleasant few weeks, magazines sent reporters to profile them and transcribe Paul’s one-liners, they were attempting to write an original romantic comedy. (“We want to push each other creatively,” Pam told Good Housekeeping. “Pam, for example,” Paul said, “has taken to pushing me creatively down the stairs.”) Despite several months of pushing, however, they remained nowhere with the script until, one Monday morning, the FedEx truck arrived with a copy of their latest profile in L.A. Weekly. Pam saw the headline of the article, “TWO’S COMPANY,” and was thunderstruck. “Two’s Company”: perfect title! “The thing we know best is the romance of marriage,” she declared. “The world doesn’t need another gag about a girl with come in her hair. The world doesn’t need another drama about adultery. What would be truly original, at this cultural moment, would be a straight-up celebration of monogamy. To create a couple who are so funny together, so right for each other, that you’re rooting for the marriage from the very first frame.”
Paul, who was frowning unhappily at the photograph that accompanied the profile, said that he agreed with her—mostly. His only tiny worry was that a too perfect couple might come across as more cutesy than ha-ha funny. As possibly even outright irritating. He also wondered what to make of the fact that the funniest married movie couple he could think of offhand, Nick and Nora Charles, were hopeless drunks. “Just, you know, wondering,” he said.
Pam said she didn’t see why Paul was being so pissy. To prove him wrong, she went to her study, which was a den of deep-pile silk rugs and pillows the size of armchairs, to create some scenes of a marriage that was both perfect and hilarious. Paul’s own office contained a four-drawer file cabinet and a folding chair. He went out to the pool and dutifully opened a notebook for one of the three pilots that he and Pam were contractually obligated to develop. In this one, called “Playing House,” two great-looking high-school seniors get married after their parents, who are friends, are killed together in a helicopter crash, and the newlyweds have to learn how to behave like grownups with big mansions and millions of dollars and how to cope with being C.E.O.s of the family businesses even though they’re still just eighteen and applying to colleges. Paul, for whom first drafts tended to be a torment, had uncharacteristically looked forward to writing the scene in which the two kids lie in bed in their middle-aged pajamas and lament the shrivelment of their sex drive; but now he didn’t see the humor in it. He felt compelled, instead, to go and lock himself in the guesthouse bathroom with a head shot of the twenty-year-old actress, Tracy Gill, whom he was hoping to cast in the pilot’s lead female role, and when he emerged from the guesthouse, nearly an hour later, his mood extremely sour, he went straight to his vintage yellow BMW roadster and gunned its extravagantly polluting engine and steered it toward the city.
Paul’s childhood had been the stuff of comedy. His father was ordained as a Presbyterian minister but left the Church to work in human resources at Raytheon and devote his leisure time to sports betting and solitary drinking while Paul’s mother found Jesus, moved to Colorado, and started a second family with an Air Force colonel whom Paul, as an adolescent, dreamed of murdering with a hatchet. At boarding school, he took to wearing all black and smoking black Sobranies, and he helped form a literary comedy troupe that played scenes like the tsar’s near-execution of Dostoyevsky for slapstick. Paul’s favorite role was a cheerful Jehovah’s Witness who kept tapping on Sylvia Plath’s kitchen door while she was trying to kill herself; he also liked to play Sartre’s alter ego, Roquentin, and stare at a tree root until its disgusting raw existence made him barf.
When Pam discovered Paul, in their second week of college, he was a gaunt loner who was almost as disdainful of girls as he was of alcohol and sports. On his dinner tray, the night she plunked her own tray down beside it, were three dishes of jello cubes, one dish of vanilla pudding, two glasses of Pepsi, and one flagrant turkey cutlet. Pam’s opening line was “Are you sure you should eat that cutlet?” By Thanksgiving, she was well on her way to having civilized him. She took him home to Durham and introduced him to her plump, jolly parents. Her father had co-written the standard college intro text in macroeconomics, and every time the family needed another million dollars he put out a new edition. (“This is my private mint,” he snickered, showing Paul his home office.) The father gave him tutorials in wine appreciation, the mother taught him to say the family motto in Latin—“Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny”—and every night, in Pam’s bedroom, which the parents had winkingly forbidden Paul to enter after 10 P.M. (“There’ll be hell to pay, young man, if you so much as lay a finger on our daughter!”), Pam unstoppered the carnal energies that had long been building up in the steel-clad cooker of Paul’s New England psyche. Prior to Paul, Pam herself had been naked only with a French exchange student, whose thick accent and single-minded pursuit of sex later became the basis for the amusing character of Pierre on her and Paul’s hit TV series, but she was such a well-loved child that she was neither surprised nor frightened when the strange, intense Yankee she’d picked out for herself became obsessively devoted to her; she took it as her due.
Which was, perhaps, Paul felt, as he drove his roadster down the 101, both the excellent and comforting thing about Pam and the root of his problem now: her lack of doubt. The funniest lines in their work, the lines with that satisfying crackle of sadism, were mostly his, but he was aware that it was Pam’s confidence and Pam’s higher tolerance for cliché that had won them their big contracts. And now, because she wasn’t engineered for doubt, Pam seemed to think it didn’t matter that she’d gained fifteen pounds since moving to the mountains and that she was thumping around the house with the adipose aquiver in her freckled upper arms; she certainly seemed not to care that they hadn’t had sex since before Labor Day; and she’d been pointedly deaf to certain urgent personal-grooming and postural hints that Paul had dropped during their photo shoot for L.A. Weekly. Indeed, the person he now imagined murdering with a hatchet was that paper’s photo editor, who, Paul was certain, had deliberately selected a shot in which Pam looked like Jackie Gleason, in order to punish her for her complacency and to ridicule Paul for his too sincere avowal, in a paragraph not three inches from Pam’s splotchy face, that everything good in his life he owed to her.
He felt trapped and isolated by the freakish particulars of a romance that Pam, even now, was endeavoring to celebrate in a film script. He wished that he
could call up some other woman, but it seemed to him unlikely that there was a single attractive female in all of Southern California who had not been nauseated by his and Pam’s repeated public declarations of their delight in each other. And so, arriving at the little office of Mathburger Productions, he simply took what he had driven down for—an old, lovingly preserved folder of his high-school scripts, and a Tracy Gill career-compilation video that his assistant had put together and that Paul was hoping might include a few scenes that Gill now regretted having shot.
Pam, meanwhile, was laughing out loud while writing her pages. These pages concerned a slightly neurotic but charming couple, Sam and Paula, who arrive in Maui for a week’s vacation. Paula, whom Pam described as “extremely attractive in a thinking man’s way,” has managed to convince herself, despite turning the heads of the resort’s buff male staffers, that she is old and dowdy and losing her appeal, and a deftly handled series of comic misunderstandings quickly persuades her that Sam is flirting with a brainless bombshell, Kimbo, whom, in reality, he couldn’t care less about.
“Uh, and why couldn’t he?” Paul said when Pam, after a month of hard work, finally showed him Act I.
“Because she’s a big-titted dolt,” Pam answered. “You know, the kind of person you’d expect a guy to be drooling over, which is what makes Paula so paranoid, which is what makes Sam feel like he’s so busted, when in fact—”
“In fact what?”
“In fact, he’s embarrassed by how uninterested he is in Kimbo. You know, like, what’s wrong with him? All the other guys in Maui are drooling over this girl. And Sam is like, Am I gay? Am I less of a man for being monogamous? Because the idea here is that it’s hard, it’s comically awkward, to still be so in love with his wife after all these years, while there’s this huge cultural pressure for him to be hitting on little chicklets like Kimbo.”
After a pause, Paul nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, O.K. I get it. That’s interesting. But what if, then, in Act II—”
“No,” Pam said in a voice that made Paul wonder if she were quite as oblivious as he’d thought. “I’ve been thinking about this sixteen hours a day,” she said, “and no. That’s the totally obvious beat: she suspects him, her suspicion gives him ideas, he tries to act on these ideas, compromising positions, crisis in marriage, love reaffirmed, lesson learned, happy ending.”
“No, I agree, that’s stale,” Paul said. “It’s just, why does Kimbo (unfunny name, by the way) have to be so cartoonish? Why can’t she be like Paula, only younger? Kind of a thinking man’s beautiful twenty-year-old?”
“Well,” Pam said, “because that wouldn’t be funny. Apart from that one little problem, its total lack of funniness, it’s a great idea.”
Paul retreated to his own study to view the regrettably quite PG-rated Tracy Gill video for the fourth or fifth time and to reread his high-school scripts and imagine them as the basis for a “Monty Python” cum “Fractured Fairy Tales” type of cable comedy hit. It was the surprisingly durable brilliance of these scripts that gave him the courage finally, after painful hesitation, to pick up his phone and call Gill’s agent to arrange a private pre-meeting meeting with the potential star of his and Pam’s potential new hit series.
The meeting took place at a Starbucks in Westwood at two on a Tuesday afternoon. Paul’s only serious complaint with the lovely Gill, in person, was that she had brought along her mother.
Mrs. Gill reminded Paul of his own mother. Her first question was “What exactly does the phrase ‘pre-meeting meeting’ mean?” Her second question was “Where’s your wife?” Her third question was “Why aren’t we meeting at your office?” Her fourth question was “Why did you not want Tracy’s agent here?”
Paul’s answers to these questions were syntactically complex. To change the subject, he went ahead and pitched his idea for a cable show based on his high-school scripts. Tracy Gill averred, with a squeal, that she’d just read “The Bell Jar.” Mrs. Gill asked Paul what he thought was funny about a young mother putting her head inside an oven.
The meeting was over in thirty-five minutes. Back up in the mountains, after a high-speed drive that Paul spent picturing a hatchet buried in Mrs. Gill’s forehead, he found his overweight wife by the pool. He was breathless with wrongdoing. His wife asked him to guess who had just telephoned her, but Paul couldn’t. “Tracy Gill’s mother,” Pam said.
Paul stopped breathing altogether. “You and Tracy Gill’s mother have been talking on the phone?”
By way of reply, Pam gathered her robe around her and stood up. “Paul,” she said, “I want you to move out. Right away.”
Her words were so unexpected, and they made Paul feel so guilty and fearful, that even though he was basically sick to death of Pam he tried to defend himself and argue for their marriage: “You’re splitting up with me because I had coffee with Tracy Gill and her mother?”
Pam shook her head. “It’s just that, before I go any further with the script,” she said, “I want you at a different address.”
Paul said, “Are you out of your mind? You think I’d actually try to steal credit?”
“At this point, Paul, I’d consider you capable of almost anything.”
“Even, my God, the crime of drinking coffee at two in the afternoon!”
“You had your chance to sign on with this project,” Pam said. “I gave you weeks and weeks and weeks.”
“This project,” Paul cried, “is a fraudulent, wishful middle-aged woman’s fantasy!”
To which Pam simply shook her head and said, “You are such a disappointment to me.”
A month later, as part of their separation agreement, Paul signed an affidavit in which he renounced all claims to “Two’s Company.” Pam’s publicist confided to Variety, “He’s a really nice guy, but she’s been carrying him for years. It finally just got to be too much.” After “Two’s Company” grossed a hundred and ten million in theatres, and Pam was photographed looking twenty pounds thinner than Paul had ever seen her, even in college, and she hooked up with a boy so chiselled and pectoral that even if he wasn’t gay he should have been, and she went on to produce more comedies for an older female audience, each more profitable than the last, Paul came to see that what had looked to him like a wishful fantasy had been a fantasy only because he personally had not believed in it: because it offended his taste. Back in Pamland, the wish was still congruent with reality; and every ticket for a film of hers, every video rental and every rave review on AM radio, was like another vote to ratify her reality at the expense of his. The whole country was against him, and so he moved to New York City, where, well-insulated financially, he worked on recasting his comic literary vignettes as little formalist short stories that he mailed out to journals. You could see him at a certain kind of party, standing near open windows, wearing black, smoking cigarettes, and hoping to talk about his favorite subject, which was the badness of his ex-wife’s films.
3
HOW HE CAME TO BE NOWHERE
ROOM 471, THE FEDERAL BUILDING, Eighth Street, Philadelphia: a perfectly square room which for no obvious reason had an eye chart on the southern wall. A leak in the roof two floors up had spread damage across the ceiling and down two other walls—ricotta-like eruptions of plaster, arrested avalanches of softened latex paint. In one corner where the cracks were especially complex, the ceiling was actually sagging. The room gave the impression of a desperate beleaguerment, as if an immense weight of water, that enemy of paper documents and even more so of anything electrical, were bearing down from above. There was a yeasty, incontinent smell of damp plaster, and rustles of official business outside the door.
How He Came to Be Somewhere: An Interview and Three Early Stories Page 6
