“Do you like living in Manhattan?” Jeremy asked me.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Not always?”
“No. Not always.”
Ploop.
Luther Cain and Craig Schiller emerged from the living room with Jack in a flurry of smiles and handshakes. The rest of us, including Jeremy, were sitting around in the kitchen waiting to see how everything turned out. I had to admit, it was pretty cool to meet Luther Cain in person. He told us that he’d had his own drug problems when he was starting out and he was going to work closely with Jack to get him back on track. He was convinced of Jack’s determination and announced that he would be his sponsor in a twelve-step program. Schiller, a heavyset guy with a beard and a ponytail, just nodded and smiled, deferring to Cain. Whatever they’d worked out in their meeting seemed to make all of them happy. Jack walked them both to the door, careful to stay out of camera range, and promised to meet them the following morning at their hotel, from which they’d all fly back to LA together. Before he left, Cain turned to us and said, “Jack’s lucky to have friends like you.” It was corny, but we all smiled like little kids because, for Christ’s sake it was Luther Cain!
Jeremy was unimpressed with Cain, but the minute the director had left, he began bombarding Jack with questions about his movies. Jack had been brought up to speed about the boy by that point, and spent a good hour talking to him. At my request, Alison produced a camera and I shot some photos of Jeremy with Jack for him to hang on his wall next to his Blue Angel posters. I knew he’d treasure the pictures and I also wanted him to have proof in case any of his friends ever doubted his story.
Our last dinner together at Crescent Lake was a long, almost festive affair. Chuck made his usual garden salad while I made a huge bowl of spaghetti in marinara sauce. Alison and Lindsey took care of the baked salmon and garlic bread while Jeremy and Jack set the table. We sat for a few hours, talking about Jack’s upcoming movies, reminiscing about college, teasing each other, and having a general good time, but I could sense the melancholy creeping in. Jack’s head was already back in LA, Chuck was itching to get back to Mt. Sinai, and I had no idea what Alison was thinking, but I could sense her withdrawing as the meal progressed. When we were finally done, Alison began washing the dishes while Jack dried. Lindsey hinted that it might be a good time to leave them alone, so the rest of us walked Jeremy back to his house. “When are you leaving?” he asked me at the foot of the stairs leading to his back door.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometime tomorrow, I guess.”
“Before I get home from school?”
“No. I’ll make sure I’m still here to say good-bye.”
“Okay,” he said. “Do you think I should live in the city?”
I smiled at him and patted his shoulder, a gesture that made me feel oddly adult. “No,” I said. “You belong right here. This place beats the city, hands down.”
“So why don’t you move here?” he asked.
“It’s not that simple.”
He shrugged. “That’s what you always say.”
Back in the house, Jack and Alison had disappeared, leaving a mess of unwashed dishes cluttered around the sink. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Chuck said. I smiled. “Do you guys have any idea whether or not they ever, you know?” He made a pushing motion with a fist and raised his eyebrows suggestively.
“Nope,” I said.
“No clue,” Lindsey said. “But I don’t think so.”
“Man,” Chuck said. “Ten years they know each other, and you think he never banged her even once? Is that possible?”
“You knew her for ten years, too,” I said. “How many times did you bang her?”
“It’s not the same,” Chuck said. “He could have had her any time he wanted. I mean, Alison’s hot. I would have if I could have. If you knew you could have a girl like that any time you wanted to, would you wait ten years?”
“I think you may be simplifying the situation just a tad,” Lindsey said.
“I just don’t think it’s possible,” Chuck said, shaking his head.
“Can I ask a question?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Why are we whispering?”
We looked at each other, and then up at the ceiling, smiling. “Ten years,” Chuck said, opening the fridge and pulling out some beers. “They deserve some quiet.”
“Maybe they’re just talking,” I said with a grin.
“Then they’d still be washing dishes,” Chuck said. “Jesus, I’m going to be the only one in this house who doesn’t get any tonight.”
“Why don’t you go find your reporter friend,” I said, heading for the stairs.
“Where the hell are you two going?” Chuck asked.
Lindsey gave him a kiss on the cheek. “To get some,” she said.
“I’m just wondering,” I said to Lindsey a little later as we lay together, our hips gently touching. “You want to be a teacher, I want to be a writer. Why do we have to live in the city to do that?”
“We don’t,” she said, running her fingernail down my side. “Why? What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to stop running in place already. We’re thirty years old, we should be building a life already, you know?”
“I know,” she said. We looked at each other for a long minute and then she gave me a soft kiss on the forehead. I could feel her smiling. “You know what I think?” she said.
“What?”
“I think I’d like to be here when those geese come back.”
When Lindsey was asleep, I went down to the kitchen for a drink, restless as usual from my nooky high, and giddy at the prospect of the major change we had discussed. I was actually humming a happy little tune when I came upon Alison in the dark, sitting on a stool by the counter, thoughtfully sipping hot tea. She was wearing a sweatshirt and shorts, her straight hair uncharacteristically messy. “Hey,” I said, thinking about Chuck’s ten-year remark.
“Hey,” she said.
I poured myself a cup of orange juice and pulled up a stool. “Where’s Jack?”
“He’s sleeping,” she said, and smiled shyly at me, confirming our earlier speculation.
“Was that the first time?” I asked. “For the two of you, I mean.”
She took another sip. “That was the first and second time,” she said with a wicked grin, but there was a sadness behind it.
“So what’s wrong?” I asked. “Is ten years of foreplay too much to live up to?”
She smiled again. “No, nothing like that.”
“So what then?”
“He asked me to come out and live with him.”
“What, in Hollywood?”
“Yep.”
“That’s great,” I said, but Alison just sipped at her tea. “That’s not great?”
“I told him no,” she said.
“Oh.”
She sighed deeply. “I think, after all these years of waiting for him to get his act together with me, I’m finally ready to move on. We came up here to get him off drugs, but I think I also came to get me off him.”
“You know he loves you,” I said.
“I know,” she said softly. “And I love him. But he’ll never be who I want him to be, which is the Jack I knew before he became ‘Jack Shaw.’ ” She put up her fingers to indicate quotation marks. “And he’ll never love me the way I want to be loved. Now he’s been shocked into this awareness that he’s somehow been changed, and that terrifies him, so he wants me to be with him, to somehow prove he’s the same guy he always was. But he’s not, and as much as I love him, I can’t go with him just because he’s scared. I deserve better than that.” She looked at me.
“You’ve thought about this,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “And I’ll probably be second-guessing myself as soon as he’s gone, kicking myself for not going with him, but right now I’m sure I’m doing the right thing. He and I are actually in the same positio
n now. We’ll both be looking to find another way to make the world go around. Him without his coke, and me without him.”
“Man,” I said, reeling from what she’d just told me. “This must be so hard for you.”
“I know,” she said. “All those years, wishing he’d just tell me he wants me. Now he does, and I don’t want to go. I must be crazy.”
“You sound pretty rational,” I said. “How’d he take it?”
“Okay. We had sex.”
“After you said no?”
She laughed. “You didn’t think after ten years I wasn’t going to at least get a taste.”
“Slut,” I said with a grin. “You know, you’d be surprised at how similar you and Chuck are sometimes.”
“Please,” she said. “I’m depressed enough already.”
I finished my drink and got up. “I’m going to sleep,” I said, giving her a small kiss.
“Ben?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“We did the right thing. For Jack, I mean.”
“It looks that way,” I said.
“You think he’ll go back to doing drugs?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so, but I didn’t think he’d take drugs to begin with.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Well, if he does, he’s on his own. I have a strict once-in-a-lifetime intervention policy.”
“I agree,” I said, setting down my glass in the sink.
“Have a good night,” Alison said.
“You okay?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” I said, pausing in the doorway, “it sounds like you know what you’re doing.”
“Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “I’m a big talker. Watch. Next week I’ll be jumping on a plane to go see him.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think we all found some new direction this week.”
“Oh, is there something you guys haven’t told us?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. Alison smiled at me and I turned and headed back up the stairs.
The reporters went berserk when Jack stepped out of the house the next morning. They were literally climbing all over each other to jockey for position and it was all the troopers could do to keep them behind the barricades. Jack walked calmly down to the front of the lawn and stood there for a few minutes, smiling and engaging in good-natured banter with the reporters. Most of the nonprofessional portion of the crowd had disappeared overnight, but there was still a pretty impressive throng of media, all clamoring for a bit of Jack’s attention. NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Hard Copy, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, Extra, The National Enquirer, The Globe, and a whole slew of local affiliates I didn’t recognize. After he’d given them about fifteen minutes he came back into the house and we all made our good-byes.
“What do you think, Ben?” he said to me after giving me a hug. “This whole thing would make a pretty cool novel, huh?”
“Could be,” I said.
“Well, if you do it, I get first dibs on the film option.”
“Deal.”
He looked at me. “Thanks again, man, for everything.”
“Just stay sober, so we can feel like we actually accomplished something.”
“Oh, I think you accomplished something,” he said, indicating Lindsey. “Don’t thank me, I’m just glad I was able to bring you two together.”
“Right.”
“Hey, it was all part of the plan.”
He gave Lindsey a hug, and then Chuck, who gave him a few hard pats on the back just to keep everything hetero. “Take care, Hollywood,” Chuck said. “Stay in touch.”
“I will,” Jack said. “I want to have you all out for the premier when we get this movie done. They’re looking at Labor Day.”
We all said okay, but I wondered if we’d really go. Then he and Alison stepped outside and got into Chuck’s rental. She would drive him to Cain’s hotel, and Jack would go back with Cain on the studio jet. We watched them as they pulled out of the driveway, Sheriff Sullivan riding in his police car behind them to make sure none of the press tried to pull a Princess Di pursuit. I think he also wanted to make sure Jack got the hell out of his town.
“Well,” Chuck said. “I guess that’s that, then.”
“You headed home now?” I asked him.
“As soon as she gets back,” Chuck said. “I’ll probably be on call for the next year straight after the shit I just pulled.”
“You love it,” Lindsey said.
“It’s a living. You guys packed?”
We looked at each other. “What for?” Lindsey said.
That was four months ago, and Lindsey and I are still in Carmelina, which is already starting to feel like home. The lake is frozen now, a phenomenon that continually fascinates me. Most nights we go walking on its icy surface after dinner, holding hands as we slide around. Sometimes we bring out a blanket and sit in the middle of the lake, just listening to the silence and looking up at the stars.
We stayed in the Schollings’s house for about two months, until mid-December when we closed on a small house on the other side of the lake. It was a stiff asking price, but Jack helped us out by paying for it in full. Now we make interest-free payments to Jack, who insists he’d like us to forget about the whole thing. “Consider it a Christmas present,” he says. Maybe in a few months we’ll agree, but for now pride keeps us writing the checks even though he has yet to deposit any of them. The house has three bedrooms, a cozy living room with a fireplace, a study, a dining room, and plenty of windows. The master bedroom has a small terrace with a full view of the lake, and when you stand on it you can see the Scholling and Miller houses across the water. Every few days Jeremy and I meet out on the lake and go ice skating while Taz slips and slides clumsily along with us.
Lindsey got a job teaching at the Carmelina Elementary School. She actually filled the slot left vacant by Peter Miller, but we don’t get morbid about it and Jeremy doesn’t seem to care. A few weeks after Jack returned amid great media fanfare to Los Angeles, Dave Boim, my boss from Esquire, got ahold of me and told me he thought it would be a good idea if I tried to write the story of Jack’s intervention for an upcoming issue. I called Jack to see what he thought and he said, “No problem, it’s a good idea. It’ll warm you up for the novel and screenplay.” I laughed, but not as much as I would have a few months ago. The article came out in January, and Jack agreed to do the cover to help push the issue, which yielded some very big numbers for Esquire. I’m actually putting together some notes for the novel. I’ve gotten a number of calls from some other magazines, and while I’m not an overnight smash, I’m a real freelancer now, not a list maker. There are a few writing assignments I might take, but right now I’m working primarily on writing fiction. Dave told me that now that I’m a contributing writer, he’ll make sure that Bob Stanwyck gives any short stories I submit serious consideration. I’m also teaching English and creative writing at Thomas Jefferson High School in Carmelina. I originally took the job just to pay the bills, but I’m enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would, although walking through the halls sometimes makes me feel old.
The night before we moved into our new home, I stepped out of the shower to hear the Schollings’s piano being played downstairs. It was a powerful piece, with strong minor chords and a soft, haunting melody. I ran downstairs to find Lindsey sitting at the piano, her body swaying as she played. I waited dumbfounded until she was done, and then, as she quietly closed the lid I said, “That was incredible!”
“Thank you,” she said simply.
“When the hell did you learn to play?”
“I’ve always been able to,” she said. “I just never played in front of anyone before.”
I was floored. “I can’t believe you can play the piano and I never knew.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said with a teasing smile.
“Like what?”
“Like, I’m pregnant.”
“No way.�
�
“Way.”
Alison and Don have been dating for about six weeks and things sound pretty solid. She turned him down twice, but the guy just kept coming at her. I know she still speaks to Jack every week, but I guess that’s a lot healthier than every day. Despite what she said that night in the kitchen, she didn’t break down and go out to LA. I don’t envy Don the baggage that probably comes with Alison from her Jack years. Still, they seem happy, and I hope it works out because I like Don and it’s always a good time when the four of us get together.
Chuck’s been seeing Sally Hughes on and off ever since he went home, and every once in a while he talks about getting serious with her, but so far it’s still pretty casual. Neither of them seems at all interested in settling down. The last time I spoke to him, he mentioned that he was looking into a hair transplant, which I didn’t take to be a good sign.
Jack finished shooting Blue Angel II, which will come out on Labor Day, and went right to work on Crossed Wires with Julia Roberts. It’s his first romantic comedy and he’s really jazzed about it. He’s also signed on to do two indie films over the summer, to build his credibility as a serious actor. “When you get your start in action,” he explained to me, “it’s an uphill battle to get any other kind of roles. The sooner you cross over, the better off you are. Otherwise, you’ll be playing the same character for the rest of your life.”
After he got back to LA he did the whole talk show thing, apologizing to Oprah and everyone else and talking about his rehab. He’s got a new group of agents at CAA. and he swears by his drug counselor, with whom he meets weekly. He’s also taken up yoga and has been flirting with Scientology. Despite all of that, or maybe because of it, I still worry about him. There’s a certain desperation in the way he needs to fill every hour with something. It’s like he’s still searching for the discipline that will become his anchor, that will keep his addiction at bay.
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