Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts

by Courtney Hamilton

  The Group was composed of the usual West Los Angeles types: a former child actress who was between shows—trying to make the nearly impossible leap from a teenage star-kiddie actress on a family cable channel to a grown-up prime-time adult actress on a network show; a female wardrobe supervisor, who, having seen firsthand the absurdly favorable treatment which stars received, really wanted to be an actress; a divorced housewife, who had already redecorated the house (and of course the garden) for the fifth time and really wanted to be a therapist; and me, an attorney who really hated life. There were also a couple of guys who really didn’t want to be there, and Frank, a sound editor, who like everyone in L.A., really wanted to direct.

  Roberta would lead the group from a large overstuffed velvet-green chair, which she referred to as “her space.” She supplied the group with a large wicker basket filled with tea selections such as “Wild Blackberry,” “Country Green Apple,” and “Cape Cod Cranberry,” which to my utter delight all tasted like liquid Jell-O. We positioned ourselves around the room amidst Roberta’s last season’s love seats, throw pillows, and Hockney collection, which she had recently removed from her Benedict Canyon home because it was being remodeled. Again.

  It often struck me as strange that Roberta was the only person in the entire group who was ever able to have or sustain a serious relationship. Whenever anyone in Group would even approach the concept of marriage, the relationship would quickly implode with chastened self-recriminations along the lines of, “I take responsibility for it,” “I still have so much work to do,” or “It just isn’t right,”—and a knowing but approving nod from Roberta. But then that person would go through another three-year cycle of therapy because they were completely depressed by their inability to have a serious relationship. It frightened me: There were people in their late 40s who had done Group for over 15 years and had never finished their “work.” And Roberta got a new Bentley every two years.

  They loved having me in Group because I would “engage”—I fought like crazy with everyone. I couldn’t believe that I was forced to sit in a room and discuss my most intimate and personal feelings with six other persons whom I had no use for, and pay for it. And I didn’t believe the façade of confidentiality, which allegedly was going to keep Group—six of the biggest blabbers I had ever met—from spreading my intimate secrets throughout Los Angeles, or the world, for that matter.

  “I see you have a problem with trust,” said Roberta after hearing my issue with confidentiality, something which I discovered was violated by every Group member on a daily basis through incessant emails to everyone they knew, specifically when there was a hot topic or a famous Group member.

  “No, I have a problem with confidentiality,” I said. “There is none.”

  I ran into trouble by interfering when the divorced housewife was trying to “engage” with one of the guys in the group by asking him a question to which I thought the answer was painfully obvious: Why wouldn’t he “be present” with her? she asked. “Because he thinks you’re repulsive,” I blurted out. That, by itself, did not get me kicked out of Group. I got kicked out when I, as Roberta put it, violated the “Implied Therapist-Patient Agreement” by asking her why I felt just as depressed as I did the day I had entered therapy 15 years ago, and for ruining the working relationship of Group by sleeping with Frank.

  As for sleeping with Frank, well, that was a mistake. Not because I did it, at least I didn’t think so. Sometime before he met me—or maybe it was always like this—Frank had developed different desires. If it had come down to three Big Macs, two large packs of fries and a Big Gulp Coke Classic, or five hours of the wildest, hottest, wettest sex with, let’s say, a bouncy Laker Girl, there would have been no contest: it was Big Mac Time all the way. To Frank, sex had become a relationship obligation, like doing the dishes, cleaning out your car, or paying your Visa bill.

  But Roberta had different ideas.

  “You see,” Roberta explained when she called to announce that I could return to Group, “Group is like a laboratory where you get to work on relationships, not have them.”

  “Ok,” I said.

  “So I need to know…” said Roberta.

  “I take responsibility for it,” I said.

  “For what?” said Roberta.

  “For having truly mediocre sex with Frank?” I said.

  “Sounds like we have something to discuss in a session,” said Roberta.

  On our first date, Frank took me to the Emmys. Ten minutes before he was supposed to pick me up, he called me from the car wash to announce that he was going to be late because he needed to clean the car—and go to Bloomingdale’s to buy a tie, pick up his suit at the cleaners, and take a shower. Interesting. It was 6:50 p.m. and the show started at 7:30.

  We made it to the Emmys by 8:45 p.m. in time for his category. He won. That was enough to make me decide, OK, there may be a future with this guy.

  There are always signs along the way that will show you what direction your relationship is headed, even if your boyfriend is telling you something different. If you honestly look at them, and don’t rationalize the obvious failings, you won’t find yourself chucking away the logic born of a college education to “consult” with someone answering the phones for 1-800-PSYCHIC.

  “The bad sex, the passive-aggressiveness, the verbal warfare—you deserve it,” said Marcie. “It’s all a by-product of violating the L.A. Eco-Chain of Dating. I told you, only date people on your level. Not above. Not below. It’s not like you haven’t done this before.”

  She had a point.

  On our first major holiday together, Thanksgiving, I wanted to attend my traditional celebration, a production of taste and refinement equaling a dinner created by Alice Waters which my gay friends James and Stefan produced. “But, Blanche, we need you to come,” said Stefan who referred to me as Blanche since the day he had his first boyfriend when we were fourteen. “We were counting on you to be the token heteros of the table. Someone has to dress terribly and have genetically inbred bad taste.”

  But Frank insisted that we celebrate with his family because this was a really important day for them. He won. When we walked in the door at 5:45 p.m., Frank’s sisters, Mary and Sari, suddenly remembered that they had to defrost the skirt steak which Mary was planning to serve for dinner at 6:00 p.m. His sisters had forgotten because they were in their eighth hour of watching the Twilight Zone Marathon. Frank took it in stride as we ate at 9:00 p.m.

  At Christmas, I was overjoyed to find Frank running around like a madman to buy presents—until I found out that they were all for his sisters. I didn’t receive anything until the last day of January when I called him and told him that I was going to buy the bookcase which he had promised me, and either he paid for it or I would. Frank explained that he just couldn’t get it together, and had thought that I “would be cool about it.”

  On Valentine’s Day, Frank told me that he had a big surprise planned. At 8:00 p.m., he walked in the door with Chicken Fajitas for two from El Pollo Loco and a juicer, which he told me that I could use whenever I wanted to. He later confessed that he had tried to get reservations all over town, but at 7:30 p.m. when he called, everything was all booked up.

  My birthday, however, was remarkably different from the pattern set on other major days—he forgot it entirely. Or I should say, he forgot it until Jennifer called him from my birthday dinner and asked him when, or if, he was planning to arrive. As we were cutting the cake, he waltzed in the door with a dozen short stem red roses and a bag of oranges which I knew he had gotten from the guy who sold flowers and fruit off the back of a pick-up near the Wilshire Boulevard on-ramp to the 405 freeway.

  At year one—the legal deadline for determining the direction of relationships—Frank asked me to marry him on a Saturday morning after I had just paid for breakfast. The moment struck me as strange because Frank had just pulled the “forgot my wallet again” routine and we were suddenly surrounded by a chorus of car alarms that
had been set off by an earthquake measuring 3.2 on the Richter scale which had its epicenter in Barstow.

  I should have known that he wasn’t really serious about the engagement because I never got a ring. Over the following year he would tell me that he was going ring shopping, but always ended up at an all-night gambling club in Gardena located near an off-ramp of the 710 freeway.

  Our relationship was OK as long as I bought into the cup-is-half-empty victim’s posture of life. After a while, the posture of downward mobility seemed pretty ridiculous for two people whose parents had performed heroic feats to give them the best education money could buy. And then I made a fatal mistake: I accidentally found something I liked to do. And then I did it well.

  While stumbling through my I-Hate-Litigation career, I discovered an area of the law which catered to my two strongest talents, talking on the phone and going to lunch. I gained a small reputation among clients who made staggering amounts of money for surprisingly little work as being “an attorney who didn’t seem like an attorney,” a talent not completely appreciated by my former colleagues.

  And then the fun began. It wasn’t just that Frank blew it on all of the major holidays and events. It was more that I was beginning to notice that he had a latent talent that I had not previously noticed: He had all the makings of a world-class whiner and he was beginning to epitomize the Angry White Guy.

  He was angry with his dad for leaving his mom, yet he despised his mother so much that he couldn’t be in a room with her for more than an hour, even at Christmas. He was angry at his mom for giving him a watch with a scratch in it, feeling sure that she had personally put the scratch in it to hurt him. He was angry at his father’s second wife because she was going to inherit his father’s work, and rob him of his inheritance. He was angry at his sister for deciding at age ten that she wanted to be an artist, a position he felt robbed him of his chance. And he was angry with me because I refused to live life stuck in neutral. And this was just personally.

  Professionally, Frank honestly felt that the reason his directing career had not taken off was because his student film had not been awarded a Student Academy Award. This he attributed to the fact that someone on the Academy judging committee had wanted to sabotage his career in its early stages. Nearly ten years later, he was still furious about it, and he insisted on projecting his student film on the white walls of my dining room at every dinner party I had, figuring someone would see the brilliance of his vision and hand him a sixty-million-dollar studio film to direct.

  “I just don’t feel seen in this relationship,” lamented Frank on a regular basis. It’s the skill of those who have spent too much of their lives in therapy to use jargon which they don’t understand to signify feelings that they don’t have the courage to be honest about. Roughly translated, this meant that Frank wanted me to take the attention and energy that I had to invest in my own career to be remotely successful and put it into his and make him successful.

  This was to be the Faustian bargain of our marriage—I was to do everything, including the Herculean feat of creating a directing career for him while supporting us, and in exchange I would get to be Mrs. Frank Jamieson.

  Maybe it was all those years of drinking liquid Jell-O with Roberta that made me believe that marriage was supposed to be a “shared equal partnership of responsible individuals with/‌without children.” This was quite far from what I was experiencing. In retrospect, I now know that my utopian concept of marriage was about as far from reality as the O.J. Simpson Defense Team’s theory of the Brown-Goldman murders, but that didn’t keep me from attempting to engage with Frank, using the skills that Roberta had taught me.

  As I plowed through my meatloaf, I surveyed the scenery. I wasn’t going to go through another year of this. One of us had to make up our mind.

  I started in. “Listen Frank, it’s time to stop screwing around.”

  “OK, OK…” he mumbled, “I’ll leave your mashed potatoes alone.”

  Hmmmmm. This was not going to be easy. “No,” I said, “cut it with the potatoes. Where is this relationship going?”

  If there are five words which can stop a man’s heart quicker than those, I don’t know what they are. Frank looked like I had just sucked the life out of him.

  “Well… you know,” he said, “it’s going.”

  I shook my head. “Not good enough,” I said. “That’s not an answer.”

  I’m sure that Roberta would have counseled me to create a safe place in the dialogue where Frank felt that he could “be present” with me. I wasn’t having any part of it.

  “Look,” I said, “we’ve been engaged for over a year. I still don’t have a ring. Every time I suggest a date, you make it six months away. When three months pass, you put the date out another six months. Enough already.”

  Although I really should have seen it coming, when I heard it I laughed so hard that I fell right out of my Copper Pan chair.

  “I still have so much work to do,” said Frank, with the chastened look which I had seen so many of Roberta’s patients adopt.

  “Oh my God!” I said as I spit out my mashed potatoes. “Frank honey, the only work you need to do is to figure out how you can get it constantly, instead of occasionally.”

  I attempted to address the issue.

  “Look, time is moving on. And while I’m willing to be in this relationship with you, I’m not willing to do it as your girlfriend.”

  Frank looked around the room.

  “Well,” he said, “I need more time.”

  “Well, I’m going to give you more time—two months to be precise. Two months to make 50 percent of the decisions in this relationship, two months to take 50 percent of all of the responsibilities, two months to pay 50 percent of all of our bills. And, two months to pick a wedding date, which must be executed by the end of this year, not the decade.” I paused for a moment to get him some water because he appeared to be choking on his burger.

  “Also, I want an engagement ring. So, I’ll give you two months to find one. And I want at least a one carat ring, with no inclusions in it.”

  I knew perfectly well that there was no chance on God’s green earth that any of this was going to happen. Frank had been ruined by therapy. His ability to make any decision, from what color car to buy, to whether he should still be mad at his dad, had been handed over to Roberta. And unless Roberta gave him the “thumbs up,” he wouldn’t marry me. And I knew Roberta wouldn’t.

  But it was time to move on and this was another decision that he would not openly make. So I gave him his out. By doing what he always did—nothing—he would end the relationship.

  As a matter of fact, he never did say or do anything. He just stopped coming over. Then he stopped calling. One morning when I went to make orange juice, I realized that his juicer was gone. And then his keys arrived in the mail.

  About the time that the juicer disappeared, my friend Stefan met Frank at a gallery opening. Frank never did tell him that we had broken up. He just said, “Courtney was great to me. But it just wasn’t right. And I have so much work to do.”

  2

  Almost Single

  “So?” asked my therapist, Roberta.

  “Can we wait until my Blueberry Tea seeps?” I said.

  Like into a Slurpee or Jell-O.

  “Tick-Tock,” said Roberta.

  “More like cha-ching,” I said.

  “I don’t like that.”

  “Sorry. Frank’s juicer is gone. I’m pretty sure that this means he is gone.”

  “Yes. He told me.”

  “Told you? I thought you ordered it.”

  “Courtney.”

  “Get real,” I said while rolling my eyes.

  “Frank and I were working on—well—you know his issues regarding commitment.”

  “What did he say?” As if I didn’t know.

  “Courtney, you know I can’t talk about this,” said Roberta while giving me a disapproving look.

  “Oh.
Of course. Confidentiality,” I said, hoping not to sound sarcastic.

  “But you gave him the ultimatum,” said Roberta, hoping to make me uncomfortable.

  I took a sip of my blueberry tea. “Decaf or regular is an ultimatum to Frank.”

  “Well yes, he does have a lot of work to do.”

  I sensed that I was getting into dangerous territory, but decided to push it.

  “You think?” I said with a big smile.

  “I don’t like cynicism. It makes our work so difficult.”

  I looked at Roberta and gave her my most serious look. “I take responsibility for it.”

  Roberta looked pissed. “Well, why the sudden ultimatum?” she asked. “You might have worked things out.”

  “Yes, after the next Ice Age. Look, I didn’t see kids, a house, and a golden lab named ‘Thor’ in our future.”

  “No one does,” said Roberta. “It’s not 1975.”

  “Yeah. Well, our marriage would have been a horrible, horrible mess.”

  “Welcome to life,” said Roberta.

  Maybe I’d made a mistake. I know that Frank was never going to marry me. But he wasn’t really awful. He didn’t beat me or anything.

  I was on a blind date with Josh, “a hot item,” because my actress/‌Chinese herbalist friend, Halley, had set us up. I was a little unsettled about the whole thing, especially when Josh didn’t pass my first requirement.

  “He’s single, right?” I asked her.

  “Almost.”

  “Almost single?” I said.

  “He’s separated—they’re planning to divorce,” said Halley.

  “That’s a hot item?”

  “Courtney, he’s employed, tall, thin, under 40, and has hair. I’m giving you a crack at him,” said Halley, with the same enthusiasm I had heard people use to describe their rent-controlled ocean view apartments in Santa Monica.

  He sounded suspicious to me.