Rent A Husband: a Romantic Comedy

by Sally Mason

  It is not enough that she has endured the anguish of having to flee both her job and the man she loves, she’s had to sit for hours in a cramped waiting room, the air a ripe cocktail of the junk food favored by her fellow travelers, their body odor and the fecal stench that wafts from the filthy restrooms.

  All that has saved her from succumbing to the vapors is a lilac-scented handkerchief held to her nose and the certainty that a bus will be arriving soon to deliver her from all this misery.

  But an announcement has just warbled through the public address system, a genderless voice informing the group of travelers that the coach to Los Angeles has broken down in Goleta—wherever that may be—and there will be no bus service to the city tonight.

  The voice invites the passengers to collect their refunds at the ticket office.

  Brontë drags herself to her feet and, humping her suitcase, stands in line until she reaches the window where a thin man with a goiter and a parrot’s beak for a nose returns her money.

  “I absolutely must get away this evening,” she says. “What am I to do?”

  “Try the train station,” he says, counting out the bills and coins. “You may be in luck.”

  So Brontë joins the other passengers as they trudge to the train station, which is mercifully adjacent to the bus depot—a small building that looks like Pancho Villa may have used it as a hideout during the Mexican Revolution.

  The relief that she feels after being told that, indeed, there is a southbound train in a few minutes is muted when, her ticket gripped tightly in her hand, she sits on a bench on the platform only to be accosted by a raving lunatic.

  A tall man with the kind of Byronic looks that under other circumstances may have brought Mr. Rochester to mind, taps her on the arm.

  Brontë flinches. “Yes?” she says.

  “You don’t happen to have anything to drink, do you?”

  “There’s water at the drinking fountain.”

  “No, I’m talking about booze. I’m told there’s none to be had until the train arrives. Scotch, brandy, hell I’d even drink potato wine right now.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t drink,” she says, deeply offended.

  “Pity. You look like a girl who knows her way around a bottle of hooch.”

  She can only shake her head.

  He leans in closer and says, “Maybe something chemical then: a Xanax or an Ambien?”

  She stands. “What on earth do you take me for?”

  Without waiting for a reply she grabs her suitcase and stalks off.

  It is only when Brontë enters the ladies’ room and confronts a figure in the mirror with hair so untamed it appears as if birds have roosted in it, a face drawn and hollow and eyes wild and staring that she understands why the man singled her out as either a dipsomaniac or a drug fiend.

  And, standing at the sink, she starts to cry and doesn’t believe she will ever, ever stop.

  66

  Back on the train a scant hour and a half after he arrived, Forrest heads straight for the dining car and slumps into a seat by the window, staring out at the platform, watching the weird girl he accidentally offended earlier—if she isn’t a juice head or a pill freak then he’s a monkey’s uncle—wander like a sleepwalker through a knot of youthful passengers waiting for the night train heading north to San Francisco.

  They are some kind of child musical ensemble, carrying their instruments.

  Forrest identifies violin, cello and horn cases, and sees the unmistakable outline of a harp beneath a dust cover.

  A woman with mauve hair fusses over kids, ticking names off a clip-board.

  When a waiter appears at his elbow, Forrest says, “Bring me five double Maker’s Marks on the rocks.”

  The man stares at him, blinking.

  “You heard me,” Forrest says, holding up a hand with all fingers spread. “Five doubles.”

  When the weird girl enters the dining car and walks toward him Forrest nods in greeting and says, “Look, I apologize about earlier. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  She rears back as if he is about to attack her and sees, “Stop following, me! Leave me alone or I’ll call the police!”

  Forrest shrinks in his seat, his hands raised in surrender and the girl scuttles by.

  The waiter arrives with his drinks and Forrest grabs a glass from the tray and has downed it by the time the other four touch the table.

  Reaching for the next glass, Forrest says, “I think we’d better have another five.”

  The jolt of neat alcohol has brought tears to Forrest’s eyes.

  It must be the booze.

  What else could make a sophisticated man of the world like Forrest Bennett Ford III cry?

  Then, as a whistle blows and the train slowly starts to move, a sight so rich in comic potential yanks Forrest Forbes from his melancholia, and he stares out of the window, open-mouthed.

  A man comes pelting down the platform, seemingly in pursuit of the train.

  A man who seems blind to the youthful musicians and their instruments who block his path like skittles.

  Oblivious to them until . . .

  67

  It’s been all about near-misses for Poor Billy Bigelow.

  He arrived at the bus station to discover that the service has been cancelled and the passengers sent next door to catch a train down to Los Angeles.

  The uniformed man in the ticket booth reluctantly allowed that a girl answering Brontë’s description had been amongst the disgruntled travelers he’d refunded.

  “You missed her by a minute,” the ticket seller said, slamming closed the window in Billy’s face.

  So Poor Billy took off for the train station, scanning the information board as he ran.

  A train waited at the platform.

  A train that would leave for Los Angeles in seconds.

  Then Billy saw her.

  Saw Brontë Baines walking slowly across the platform, dragging her suitcase behind her.

  “Brontë!” he yelled, but his voice was lost in the piercing shriek of the whistle.

  And now, from all the way up the platform, he watches as Brontë steps up into the train and disappears.

  Another near-miss.

  Billy sets off in a sprint, running faster then he has since he was last in a race in the fourth grade—an event so embarrassing that its memory sears him even now, and he forces it from his mind as he rockets down the platform.

  “Brontë!”

  The train is clanking and creaking and slowly starting to move.

  Billy, his eyes fixed on the compartment that’s swallowed up the love of his life, picks up speed, oblivious to the thirty members of the California Children’s Orchestra standing with their musical instruments.

  And this time he doesn’t miss.

  Later, after the train is long gone and Billy has been released from police custody—the authorities finally convinced that he had not launched a solo attack on the youthful musicians—he is able to piece together what happened.

  He barreled in the second violinist first, a slight girl with braces.

  And she tumbled into the stocky cellist, whose bulky instrument collected the harpist in the jaw and she went down, taking with her the kettle drummer and his apparatus, and then down went all the others like a row of dominoes, leaving Billy lying under a pile of small screaming bodies and large instrument cases, kicking and yelling “Brontë! Brontë!” as the train clattered away into the night.

  68

  It’s night by the time Darcy drives the SUV into her garage and triggers the remote that lowers the door.

  She sits in the gloom, listening to the car click and ping, loathing the idea of going inside the house that is nothing so much as a monument to her bastard of an ex-husband.

  How could she have kissed that loathsome reptile?

  She scrubs her lips with a Kleenex, as if that will rid her of twenty years of stupidity.

  What need you need is a glass of wine and a long soak
in the tub.

  In the morning you can start afresh.

  Start living your life.

  The memory of Forrest Forbes and his hands and his tongue and his skin wafts into Darcy’s consciousness and almost brings a smile to her face.

  She leaves the car and lets herself into the kitchen.

  Heading straight for the fridge she splashes white wine into a glass, throws most of it back and fills the glass again.

  As Darcy walks through to the living room she hears the front door bell.

  Porter.

  The selfish, egocentric creep has followed her home.

  She slams her glass down on the table and yanks open the door, ready for mortal combat.

  Eric Royce, seeing her face, quickly raises his hands in dual V signs.

  “I come in peace, neighbor.”

  Darcy sighs and slumps against the door.

  “God, Eric, am I pleased to see you.”

  She stands aside to let him enter.

  He stares at her.

  “Tough day in paradise?”

  “Yes.”

  She drops down on the couch and glugs her wine.

  “Porter?” he asks.

  “Yes, Porter,” she says with a moan, closing her eyes.

  “Did you see Forrest?”

  She blinks and stares at Eric.

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  And he tells her about Forrest Forbes appearing at her door in a taxi, then heading off toward town on foot.

  “I tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up,” he says.

  Darcy fishes her muted cell phone out of her jeans and sees a missed call from Eric.

  And a missed call from Forrest.

  And she knows with an awful certainty that Forrest went to the coffee shop and the vile Carlotta McCourt sent him off to the beach where he saw Darcy kissing Porter.

  She dials his number and when it goes directly to voice mail she kills the call, and slumps back with her eyes closed tight.

  A horrible, horrible day has just got even worse.

  The one thing that had still glowed like a small symbol of hope—the fantasy of another liaison with Forrest Forbes—had now been trashed.

  “Eric, be an angel and pour me another glass of wine. In fact, why don’t you bring the bottle?”

  “It’s like that is it?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “It’s like that.”

  When he returns he carries not only the wine bottle, but a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy and two spoons.

  “Eric, your feminine side is way too developed.”

  “That’s what my dear old pop used to say when he was beating the stuffing out of me.”

  He scoops a spoonful of ice cream and licks it.

  “Mnnnn. But, as they say, living well is the best revenge.”

  He hands the tub to Darcy.

  “Eat and drink, darling. You can fight on tomorrow.”

  She eats.

  She drinks.

  She even smiles.

  “So,” he says. “Dish.”

  And dish she does, telling him all about Porter and his slimy maneuvers.

  “He’s a cockroach, Darcy. The lowest form of life.”

  “He is. How could I have fallen for it? And how could I have kissed him?”

  Eric takes her hand.

  “Because you’re human, and because you loved him deep and true for many long years.”

  “I did. What a loser I am.”

  “No, sweetheart, he’s the loser. Now, give yourself some props girlfriend and forget the kiss. I want you to remember the slap and the kick and savor those memories.”

  She laughs as she sees Porter sinking to the sand, clutching his middle.

  “Boy, I got him good.”

  She spoons ice cream.

  “Poor Forrest. What do you think he was doing up here?”

  “Well, he wasn’t canvassing for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was he?” Eric says around a mouthful of Benny and Jerry’s. “He’s smitten, Darcy, and clearly he came up here to tell you as much.”

  “And now he’s fled, never to be seen again.”

  “Nonsense. Tomorrow you’re going to drive down to LA and make nice with Mr. Forbes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And tonight?”

  Eric tops up her wine glass.

  “Tonight you’re going to get completely stinko and have a slumber party with little old moi. Up for it?”

  “You’re the doctor,” she says throwing back half her glass. Then she moves a strand of hair away from her face. “You’re a good friend, Eric. Thanks for being here.”

  “Nowhere else I’d rather be, Darce, nowhere at all.”

  Later, when the wine and the ice cream have worked their magic and Darcy snores softy on the couch, Eric tiptoes into the kitchen and thumbs Forrest Forbes’s number on his cell phone.

  “Just let him answer,” he says to the kitchen ceiling, “and I promise I’ll quit trying to do your job ever again. Deal?”

  But nobody is listening, because Forrest Forbes’s phone goes straight to voice mail.

  Eric sighs and returns to the living room to watch over his sleeping friend.

  69

  Humiliated, depressed and defeated, Billy leaves the Santa Sofia sheriff’s office.

  He has been released after formally apologizing to the members of the Children’s Orchestra and their shrewish mauve-haired chaperone, a woman who’d demanded that Billy rot in jail before the sheriff suggested she turn the other cheek.

  “I would,” she’d said. “But it’s bruised!”

  She relented, however, and Billy is free to go.

  Walking out into the night he thinks that the name Poor Billy Bigelow has never suited him better.

  Bill be damned.

  William be damned.

  It will be Poor Billy Bigelow carved on the headstone the day he’s buried in the Santa Sofia cemetery beside his mother, father and sister.

  And, as he shuffles down the stairs to the sidewalk, Poor Billy hopes that day isn’t long in coming.

  Then he hears two sheriff’s deputies leaning on a patrol car, talking about a freight train derailed down near Los Angeles.

  Billy recognizes one of the men from school, a thickset bully by the name of Bucky Eckhard.

  “Evening, Bucky,” Billy says.

  “Hi, Billy. Run into any interesting musicians lately?” Eckhard says in his braying voice and his pal slaps the roof of the cruiser in appreciation.

  “That’s a good one, Bucky.” Billy stretches his face into an ingratiating grin. “What’s this I hear about some trouble with the railroad?”

  “Yeah, a freight train jumped the tracks down near Oxnard.”

  “So, it’ll delay the passenger train from Santa Sofia?”

  “Reckon it will, unless it can sprout wings and fly,” Eckhard makes flapping motions.

  The other deputy takes pity on Billy. “You got somebody on that train?”

  “Yes, a close friend.”

  “Okay, latest we heard is that there’ll be at least a two hour delay. So just call your buddy and tell them to sit tight.”

  Billy turns and sprints to where his old station wagon is still parked outside the train station.

  Two hours to get from Santa Sofia to Union Station in LA.

  Can he make it?

  He has to.

  70

  Forrest, as the old saw would have it, can drink as if he has a wooden leg.

  He’s one of those people who reach a level of inebriation and then, rather then plummeting into oblivion, plateau out and seem to be able to keep on drinking forever.

  Of course, sitting in the train that’s stalled somewhere in God-forsaken SoCal (how can people use that hideous abbreviation?) he knows that this isn’t quite true.

  There is a drink out there waiting for him, a drink with the power to drop the hammer that’ll send him into a state of unconsciousness t
hat could last for as long as a day.

  He raises a fresh glass of Scotch and says, “Do your worst,” before he throws it back in one gulp.

  Nope.

  Not that one.

  He’s still upright, still staring out into the darkness.

  Still able to summon his very special friend the waiter, who—he has come to believe—has a bet going with the barkeep, a hirsute fellow with a forehead like a motorcycle helmet, on how many more drinks Forrest will be able to absorb.

  The new quintet of drinks arrives and Forrest starts in on them.

  The notion of a bet sets his addled mind off on a toxic train of thought.

  He sees another bartender, the oily Rick, polishing a clean glass with a dirty rag saying, “Your Mr. Darcy is running again Friday at Hollywood Park.”

  Friday.

  That’s tomorrow.

  Friday has another significance, Forrest knows, and tries to tease an answer from his brain that, quite pleasantly, feels as though it’s wrapped in cotton wadding.

  Music gives him the cue.

  A few bars of an Indian raga.

  Whether it comes from inside the train before it is abruptly silenced, or whether it’s a product of his imagination is unimportant, it takes him back into the stinking alley behind the Jaipur Palace, Lakshmi’s thuggish landlord threatening her with eviction if he doesn’t get the rent money on Friday.

  Forrest feels a moment of booze-fueled affection for Lakshmi that almost has him weeping again.

  She is his oldest and dearest and truest friend and he’s ignored her plight, so wrapped up was he in his teenage passion for Little Miss Girl Next Door.

  A gut-twisting flashback of the kiss on the beach damn nearly pitches Forrest into that looming coma.

  Enough.

  He slams down his glass on the counter, waving away the waiter who is as keen as a greyhound at the starting gate.

  The starting gate.

  Yes.

  Mr. Darcy at Hollywood Park.

  Yes, yes.

  Forrest will win a bundle of cash tomorrow and square Lakshmi’s debt.