While they were talking, an extraordinarily beautiful woman walked by their table. Ruthie noticed that although Davis saw the woman, he didn't offer a second glance or ogle her the way a few of the men at some of the tables did. It was a show of respect from Davis for her feelings, and that made her feel even closer to him. By the time the dishes had been removed from the table and she was finishing her second cup of coffee, she had told him all about her life. Even about her two brothers dying when she was very little. She talked about her love for Shelly and explained why they lived like brother and sister.
Davis didn't make any judgments, make any gesture that could have been construed as a negative comment about what she was saying. He seemed to think everything she was telling him was okay. And Ruthie invited him to come for dinner one night, knowing she could convince Shelly to cook.
"Only if you'll let me reciprocate and make dinner for the two of you," Davis answered.
"Of course," Ruthie said, in a voice that she was afraid sounded too loud and too eager. This was the best result she could have imagined. Davis liked Shelly too.
When her mother invited her for Passover, hinting as only her mother could that it might be her father's last ("With that heart, he's liable to croak any minute. He has to stick a heart pill under his tongue just to watch the eleven o'clock news"), she accepted.
The few days she spent sleeping in her old room made her glad she'd agreed to come back. Her father conducted their own quiet little Seder service, and aside from the store-bought gefilte fish, Ethel Zimmerman cooked all the traditional foods Ruthie remembered eating when she was a child. During dinner, in a rare moment, her mother even reminisced about Martin and Jeffrey. "When they were little boys they used to say, 'Ma, when we grow up, we'll have a double wedding. It'll be the biggest party in the world, and you and Daddy will be the king and the queen of the wedding. There'll be lots of cake and dancing with an orchestra just like at our bar mitzvahs.' "
"But," her father jumped in, "I told them the difference will be that I don't have to pay for it," and then he added, "I was kidding them, because for a wedding, the father of the bride always pays."
A silence fell over the table then as the three of them ate the matzoh ball soup. All of them were thinking the same thought. That in this family there had been no bride.
Davis. Wouldn't her parents love him, Ruthie thought. Okay, he was divorced, or soon to be divorced, but that they could forgive. Once they talked to him and he laid on the charm, her mother would melt, and her father would say, "A good head on his shoulders."
"I have a boyfriend," she said quietly. Her mother dropped the spoon into her soup dish.
"Besides that Sheldon?" she asked.
That Sheldon. After all these years she still referred to Shelly as "that Sheldon."
"So who?" her father asked.
"He's a lawyer. An entertainment lawyer. Jewish."
With every word she could see her mother sit up straighter. Maybe this was a bad idea. Premature. Davis hadn't even kissed her yet.
"Divorced," she said.
"Well," her mother said quickly. "That happens."
For a while there was no sound but the slurping of soup, until her mother had a thought she couldn't hold inside.
"Listen," she said, "Molly Sugarman's daughter, Phyllis, didn't have her first baby until she was forty years old, and the baby is perfect."
"Ethel, please," said her father, "first let's meet the guy and then we'll talk babies."
"Why not plan ahead? You think it's so easy to get a party room at Webster Hall? Sometimes you need to call six months in advance."
"Ruthie," her father said, turning to her seriously, "you'll give us notice? And you won't elope?"
"I promise, Daddy."
That night, after her parents were asleep, she lay in her old bed, remembering the other day when Davis drove her to the airport, and hugged her close, saying he would miss her. She had smiled about that for the entire flight. Tomorrow she'd be back in L.A. and things with him would probably start to get serious. God, she could hardly wait.
Just before she turned over to go to sleep she realized it was only eight o'clock in Los Angeles. She probably should call home and see how old Shel was doing without her. She picked up the receiver of the pink phone her parents had given her when she was sixteen and called her own number in Los Angeles.
"H'lo."
"Hi, it's me."
"Ruthie!" Shelly said, in a very loud voice. "Uh . . . hi there, Ruthie." There was noise in the background. "Let me turn down the music," he said, and then was gone from the phone for a while that was too long for just turning down music in their small apartment. "So, how's it going?" he asked her when he got back to the phone.
"Shel, it's so cute," she said, confiding in him. "My parents have really been wonderful this time. They even talked about my brothers tonight, and maybe it's because they haven't been bugging me at all, but I actually told them about Davis."
"About Davis?" he said, again too loud. "What about him?"
"About my seeing him, and how terrific he is, and how he's so perfect for me. So right away my mother starts talking about somebody she knows whose daughter had a baby at forty. Is that hysterical?"
There was no sound.
"Shel?"
"I'm here."
"You okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. You coming in tomorrow?"
"At two-ten."
"You want me to pick you up?"
"Has Davis called? He said he was going to call you and make sure you were okay while I was gone, and find out when I was coming in. So I thought he would probably pick me up."
"I'll tell him," Shelly said.
"Good idea," Ruthie said. "Give him a call, and remind him that I'll be in at two and see if he can make it. If not, I'd really appreciate it if you could pick me up." She switched on the pink lamp next to the bed and looked for her purse. When she found it, she pulled out her little telephone book.
"Here," she said to Shelly, "I'll give you his number."
"I don't need his number," Shelly said. "He's sitting right here."
7
BARBARA SINGER looked across the desk at Ruthie Zimmerman. She was certainly not the unattractive girl she kept describing in the story she'd been telling about her life. She was attractive in a funky way. And though she joked through the telling of her story, Barbara, who often used the same device of humor to cover her feelings, recognized it as subterfuge. It all seemed to be leading to something painful and difficult.
"What happened when you got back from Pittsburgh?" Barbara asked her.
"Shelly and Davis met me at the airport and said they both loved me but that they loved each other romantically and they were sure I'd understand. And you know what? I did understand. Because I thought both of them were so great, they should be with each other and not me. Kind of like Groucho Marx saying he'd never belong to any club that would have him as a member.
"So Shelly and I kept working together, only he moved into Davis's house, and I bought myself a condominium in Brentwood. I mean basically at that point all we were then was business partners."
"You sound very matter-of-fact about it all. Is that how you felt?"
"Are you kidding? At the time I felt like killing both of them. I hated Davis for using me to get to Shelly. I hated Shelly for taking Davis away from me. I hated myself for being the dumbest woman alive. But I acted like it was okay with me. Shrugged it off and said hey, no problem. Because I just couldn't let go."
"Of what?"
"Of Shelly," she said, and the look on her face made Barbara push the tissue box on the desk closer to her. "I couldn't stand the idea that I could lose him."
One morning they were just finishing a pilot script, working at Ruthie's condo, when their agent called and asked if they wanted to write a movie of the week for Pam Dawber.
"I think you should take it," Shelly said.
Ruthie looked at her watch. "Geez, Shel,
it's almost lunchtime and we still don't know what we're going to do for the act break."
"I'm going to stop work for a while," he told her.
"Me too," Ruthie said. "I'm going to pick up my cleaning and get a sandwich. I'll be back around two, and then we have to decide what to do about the second act, and call Solly back about the script for Pam Dawber. You want me to bring you anything?"
"I mean stop for a long time, Ruth. Not do the movie for Pam Dawber or any other project for a while. Because Davis wants me to be around the house more. Work with the architect on the plans for the remodel and—"
No! She couldn't believe this. Now he was going to stop writing with her, too? "And be his wife?" Ruthie flared, feeling as if her whole life was being pulled out from under her. "No, goddammit. No." Shelly didn't flinch. "You mean you'll take over where the former Mrs. Bergman left off? Shel, that's crazy. Don't let him do that to you. You'll end up playing tennis and going shopping every day and not having any self-worth. You can't give up a good career to stay home and just run the house."
Ruthie sat on the edge of her desk, looking out the window. She was tired. They'd been rushing to finish their current pilot, working endless hours, and what she felt like doing now was taking a long nap.
"Hey!" Shelly said, "I like the idea. I've been working all my life, pounding a goddamned piano and writing stupid songs and sketches to make a couple of bucks. I'm just dropping out of a painfully hard business to sleep late, eat great, and redecorate. And in my case it's with someone I love. How bad can that be? Wouldn't you take that deal? Goddamned right you would."
That was low, she thought, since they both knew she'd been planning on taking exactly that deal. She left the office and the building, and nearly got hit by a car when she crossed Sunset against the red light.
"Ruuuthie." Davis always greeted her so warmly when she called to talk to Shelly, and maybe, just maybe there was a hint of mockery in the greeting. "How's the funnyness business?" he'd ask, and she didn't have an answer. Sometimes late at night she would just lie in bed, wanting to talk to Shelly, wishing she could go into the next room and find him the way she had for the years they lived together. Then she would picture him at home with Davis.
But she never thought about the sexual part of their relationship. It was imagining the cozy part that made her envious. Shelly and Davis reading the Sunday paper together, doing the crossword puzzle, playing Scrabble. When it came to Scrabble there wasn't any way that Davis could give Shelly as big a fight as she had.
She finished the project for Pam Dawber and was offered a two-year exclusive deal to write pilots for Twentieth Century-Fox TV. They would give her an office and a secretary at the studio, lots of money, and a parking place with her name on it. And all she had to write were a couple of pilots. Shelly was wide-eyed.
"They'll give you how much? They didn't ever offer that much to the two of us."
"I'll be glad to split it with you," she said, squeezing a lemon wedge above her salad and watching the juice spurt. "Just come back to work."
"Can't" was what it sounded like he said, but later when Ruthie thought about it she decided that maybe he'd actually said something else.
One night after Davis and Shelly got back from a trip to Hawaii, Shelly invited her for dinner. Davis barbecued the chicken outside while Shelly was inside making the salad, and Ruthie helped him chop. He seemed upset. Finally he said in a voice that was designed for Davis not to hear, "He's going to be traveling to New York a lot for the next few months on business. I'm going to go berserk without him. I'll probably be calling you every five minutes for solace."
Ruthie was starting to feel annoyed every time she was with Shelly. The way he mooned over Davis, tiptoed around his moods and feelings, made every plan around Davis's whims and schedule. When she got into her car after saying good night to the two of them she decided she didn't want Shelly to call her for solace. And she wasn't going to call him. She was starting to make some friends over at Fox, some other women writers and a woman in casting. She would make dinner plans with them and keep busy, and Shelly would be just fine without her.
Once, years before, when she lived in the dormitory at Pitt, she overheard a girl in the next room crying as she told a friend, "I called my mother and told her that he broke up with me. That he took his pin back from me and gave it to another girl on the same day, and do you know what she said? She said, 'Throw yourself into your work.' Throw yourself into your work? My life is ending and she says, 'Throw yourself into your work'!'' The girl's crying had echoed through the walls of the dormitory for hours.
Ruthie thought of that incident while she tried to throw herself into her work. She wrote another movie of the week and got an assignment to write a pilot called "May's Kids," which was about a children's talent agent. One day she realized it had been more than two months since she'd spoken to Shelly. Apparently he had done just fine at home alone during Davis's New York travels. That hurt. It was one thing for him to be too busy for her when he was with his lover, but when he was alone. Not to call. Maybe something was wrong. Obviously something was wrong. Maybe she should call him.
It was ten o'clock at night, not such a great time to call people out of the blue like this. The phone rang ten or twelve times, and Ruthie was about to hang up when she heard a tiny, quiet voice pick up the phone and say hello. Oh, God, she woke them. The voice didn't sound like Shelly.
"Shel?"
"Yeah."
"Shelly, it's Ruthie."
"Hi, Ru," he said. And then he said, "Oh, my God." And it sounded like he started to cry.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"Then why do you sound so—"
"I can't talk," he said. "I can't. I can't talk to anybody anymore." And he hung up.
Something was very wrong with Shelly. If Davis was at home, Shelly wouldn't be able to talk, so there was no point in calling him back and trying to get him to tell her what the problem was. Maybe she should go over there. It wasn't very far. A light rain was falling. She could see it on the tiny terrace outside the sliding doors of her living room. She'd be crazy to put her shoes and her raincoat on and start looking for her glasses and her keys and schlep over there to Shelly's, just to find out that he and Davis had had some lovers' quarrel.
No. She'd sit down now, make a few last-minute notes on the pilot script. Then she'd take a nice long bath and try not to think about Shelly and his dramatic voice on the phone. The tub was already full when she changed her mind. Somewhere in her stomach where she always knew the right thing to do, she was sure she had to at least drive by that house and check on Shelly. She threw her raincoat over her sweatpants and UCLA sweatshirt, found her old Nike Waffle Trainers under her bed, located her car keys on the kitchen counter, and made her way down to the cold quiet garage in her building.
"Why am I doing this?" she wondered out loud as she was unlocking her car in the cold garage. And again as she drove through the rain-slicked streets. "Why am I doing this?"
Davis's car wasn't outside the house. Shelly's was. Ruthie pulled her car into the carport, turning her lights off, and when she'd turned the engine off she sat shaking her head at what a dumb jerk she was to come running over here. The rain had stopped, and everything was so quiet; maybe she could just look in a window and see if everything was all right.
She stepped slowly out of the car, and carefully closed her car door to try to make the least amount of noise. The freshly wet grass sent up a sweet smell and the moon cast a white glow on the house as Ruthie walked from window to window, looking into each one, first at the pretty country French living room, then the dining room, and now the yellow-and-blue French kitchen, all dimly lit, and all orderly. Davis was away, and Shelly was asleep, and tomorrow he would call her and tell her why he'd sounded so weird on the phone. So why couldn't she stop herself from turning the knob on the kitchen door, which was unlocked, my God, it was unloc
ked, and pushing it open?
Her Nikes squeaked on the tile kitchen floor, and she was so afraid she could feel the waves of panic coursing through her, but she couldn't turn around. She moved to the staircase, and quickly up the steps, passing the two extra bedrooms, toward the new master suite, the door of which was wide open. No one was inside. Oh, God. Davis and Shelly had gone out somewhere in Davis's car. Maybe they did have a fight, and they'd gone out to have a drink and sit and talk it over. Probably they took Davis's car and would be home any minute and find her there. Wouldn't she be mortified? She had to get out of there.
Suddenly she had to pee. So badly that she knew she'd never make it to her car, start it, and then get to a gas station. Never. She'd have to go into Shelly and Davis's bathroom and pee fast then run to her car and get the hell out of there before they got home. She hadn't even seen the master bathroom since it was remodeled. She'd seen the plans a few times, knew how they wanted it to look. This was her chance to see it, she thought, and laughed a little giggle at how ridiculous this story would be to Shelly if the two of them ever sat down alone again to talk. The phantom who peed and stole away into the night.
She didn't dare turn on the bathroom light. Suppose they came driving up and spotted a light on where they'd left darkness? She'd have to find her way to the toilet in the . . . Jesus. What was that on the floor? No. Who was it? By the moonlight pouring in the bathroom window she could see now that it was Shelly, curled up in front of the marble bathtub, an empty pill bottle next to him. Dead. Limp. Gone. Dead. Shelly.
A sick, horrifying numbness filled her, and she sank to her knees and put her head on his dead body. As if from a distance, she could hear her own voice begging the lifeless body of Shelly to tell her why he did this. How could he take himself away from her? Hating him, she beat on his skinny unresponsive frame and screamed his name as all of her pulsed with the horror of this loss. Shelly, her love. Dead.
Laying her head on his chest, she wailed, a cry that made her head pound. But then she realized the sound wasn't in her head. It was a heartbeat. A heartbeat! Alive.
The Stork Club Page 6
