The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  She broke off, on the verge of tears. I reached for her. She immediately pulled away.

  “You’re never touching me again,” she said.

  Silence. Then she said, “When I found out the name of your squeeze, do you know what I first thought? ‘He’s really trading upward, isn’t he? The senior head of comedy at Fox Television. Magna cum laude from Princeton. And a babe to boot.’ The private investigator was a very thorough guy. He even supplied pictures of Ms. Birmingham. She’s very photogenic, isn’t she?”

  “We could have talked this out . . .”

  “No, there was nothing to talk out. I certainly wasn’t going to play the poor little woman in some country song, begging her faithless husband to come on home.”

  “So why did you stay silent all this time?”

  “Because I was hoping you might come to your senses . . .” She broke off again, clearly trying to keep her emotions in check. This time I didn’t reach for her.

  “I even gave you a deadline,” she said. “Six months. Which, like a fool, I extended to seven, then to eight. Then, around a week ago, I could see you had decided to leave . . .”

  “I hadn’t reached that decision,” I lied.

  “Bullshit. It was written all over you . . . in neon lights. Well, I decided to make the decision for you. So, get out. Now.”

  She stood up. So did I.

  “Lucy, please. Let’s try to . . .”

  “What? Pretend the last eight months didn’t happen?”

  “How about Caitlin?”

  “My, my, you’re finally thinking about your daughter . . .”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “Fine—you can come back tomorrow . . .”

  I was going to argue my case for staying the night on the sofa and trying to discuss everything in the saner light of day. But I knew she wouldn’t listen. Anyway, this was what I wanted. Well, wasn’t it?

  I picked up my suitcase. I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t accept apologies from shits,” Lucy said and stormed upstairs.

  I sat in the car for ten minutes, immobile, wondering what I should do next. Suddenly, I found myself on my feet, racing back to my front door, and pounding my fist against it, yelling my wife’s name. After a moment, I heard her voice behind the door.

  “Go away, David.”

  “Give me a chance to—”

  “What? Tell me more lies?”

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake . . .”

  “Too bad. You should have thought about that months ago.”

  “I’m just asking for the opportunity—”

  “There is nothing more to say.”

  “Lucy . . .”

  “We’re done here.”

  I dug out my house keys. But as I tried putting the first one into the lock, I heard Lucy throw the inside bolt.

  “Don’t think about trying to get back in here, David. It’s over. Just leave. Now.”

  I must have spent the next five minutes thumping the door again, pleading my case, begging her to take me back. But I knew that she was no longer interested in hearing what I had to say. Part of me was absolutely terrified at this realization—my little family, destroyed by my own vanity, my newfound success. Yet another part of me understood why I had traveled down this destructive path. I also knew what would happen if the door suddenly opened now and Lucy beckoned me inside: I would be returning to a life without edge. And I remembered something a writer friend told me after he left his wife for another woman. “Of course the marriage had a few problems—but none that were so overwhelming. Of course there was a bit of ennui—but that’s also par for the course after twelve years of togetherness. Fundamentally, there was nothing that wrong between us. So why did I go? Because a little voice inside my head kept asking me one simple question: Is this everything life is going to be?”

  But this recollection was superseded by a voice bellowing inside my head: I can’t do this. More than that, I thought: You’re so conforming to male cliché. And you’re also upending everything that is important in your life for a headlong dash into the unknown. So I fished out my cellphone and desperately punched in my home number. When Lucy answered, I said, “Darling, I’ll do anything . . .”

  “Anything?”

  “Yes, anything you ask.”

  “Then fuck off and die.”

  The line went dead. I glanced back at the house. All the lights downstairs were off. I took a deep, steadying breath, then walked to my car and got inside. I dug out my cellphone and stared at it, knowing if I made the call I was about to make, I would be crossing the frontier marked “No Way Back.”

  I made the call. Sally answered. I told her that I had finally done what she’d been asking me to do: I had told my wife it was over. Though she asked all the touchy-feely questions about how Lucy took the news (“Not well,” I said), and how I was faring (“I’m glad it’s behind me”), she sounded genuinely thrilled. For a moment I wondered if she saw all this as some sort of victory—the ultimate merger and acquisition. But the moment passed when she told me how much she loved me, how hard this must have been for me, and how she would always be there for me. But though I was reassured by these declarations, I still felt a desperate hollowness—to be expected under the circumstances, but disquieting nonetheless.

  “Get over here now, darling,” she said.

  “I have nowhere else to go.”

  The next day, Lucy and I agreed in a terse phone call that I would pick up Caitlin after school.

  “Have you told her?” I asked.

  “Of course I told her.”

  “And?”

  “You’ve just destroyed her sense of security, David.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “I’m not the one ending the marriage. That was your decision. Like I said last night, if you’d just give me a chance to prove—”

  “No sale,” she said, and hung up.

  Caitlin wouldn’t let me kiss her hello when she saw me outside her school. She wouldn’t let me hold her hand. She wouldn’t speak to me when we got into the car. I suggested a walk along the seafront at Santa Monica. I suggested an early dinner at Johnny Rockets in Beverly Hills (her favorite restaurant). Or maybe a trip to FAO Schwarz in the Beverly Center. As I reeled off this list of potential options, the thought struck me: I’m already sounding like a divorced dad.

  “I want to go home to Mommy.”

  “Caitlin, I’m so sorry about—”

  “I want to go home to Mommy.”

  “I know this is awful. I know that you must think I’m—”

  “I want to go home to Mommy.”

  I spent the next five minutes trying to talk her into hearing me out. But she wouldn’t listen to me. She just kept repeating the same line over and over again: “I want to go home to Mommy.”

  So, eventually, I had no choice but to do as she asked.

  When we reached the front door of our house, she fled into Lucy’s arms.

  “Thanks for brainwashing her,” I said.

  “If you want to talk to me, do it through a lawyer.”

  Then she went inside.

  Actually I ended up talking to Lucy through two lawyers from the firm of Sheldon and Strunkel, who came highly recommended from Brad Bruce (he’d used them for his previous two divorces, and had them currently waiting in the wings if marriage number three tanked). They, in turn, talked to Lucy’s lawyer—a woman named Melissa Levin, whom my guys described as an exponent of the “Let’s eviscerate the sonofabitch” school of legal practice. From the outset, she didn’t simply want to seize all my material assets; she also wanted to make certain that I came out of the divorce hobbled and boasting a permanent limp.

  Eventually, after much expensive wrangling, my guys managed to curb her scorched-earth tendencies—but the damage was still pretty formidable. Lucy got the house (and all my equity in it). She also received a whopping $11,000-per-month alimony and child support package. Given my newfound success, I could afford this—and I
certainly wanted Caitlin to have everything and anything she wanted. But it did appall me to think that, from this moment forward, the first $200k of my gross income would be spoken for. Just as I wasn’t pleased about the clause that Levin the Impaler also included in the settlement: allowing Lucy the right to move with Caitlin to another city, should her career require it.

  Four months after our fast-track divorce was finalized, she exercised that option when she landed a job heading the human resources division of some software company in Marin County. Suddenly, my daughter was no longer down the road. Suddenly, I couldn’t play hooky from my desk for an afternoon and take off with her after school to Malibu or to the big ice-skating rink in Westwood. Suddenly, my daughter was an hour’s flight away from me—and as the season went into production, I found it impossible to see her more than once a month. That bothered me to the point where, on those frequent nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d pace the floors of the large West Hollywood loft that Sally and I rented and ponder why I had fractured my family. I knew all the reasons: a marriage that had become inanimate . . . the dazzling style and brilliance of Ms. Birmingham . . . the seductive momentum that accompanies success (and the desire to slam the door on all those past years of failure). But in those four-in-the-morning moments of private despair, I couldn’t help but think: I shouldn’t have fallen so easily when pushed. Surely I could have talked Lucy into taking me back. Surely we could have made a go of it again.

  But then, come morning, there would be a script to finish, a meeting to take, a deal to ink, an opening to attend with Sally on my arm—in short, the relentless forward momentum of success. It was a momentum that would allow me to temporarily dodge the lingering guilt, the silent, ever-present uncertainty about everything in this new life of mine.

  Of course, news of my changed domestic setup was on the Hollywood bush telegraph within moments of my departure from the family home. Everyone said all the right solicitous things (to my face, anyway) about the difficulties of ending a marriage. The fact that I had “run off” (to use that meretricious expression) with one of the most high-profile young television executives in town didn’t do my standing any harm. I had traded upward—and, as Brad Bruce told me, “Everyone knew you were a smart guy, David. Now everyone’s going to think you’re a really smart guy.”

  My agent’s reaction, however, was typically caustic. Alison knew and liked Lucy—and in the wake of the deal for the first season of Selling You, she had warned me to dodge all home-wrecking temptations. So, when I broke the news that I was about to start a new life with Sally, she fell silent. Finally she said, “I guess I should congratulate you for waiting over a year before doing something like this. Then again, it’s what always happens out here when somebody has the big breakthrough.”

  “I am in love, Alison.”

  “Congratulations. Love is a wonderful thing.”

  “I knew you were going to react this way.”

  “Sweetheart—don’t you know that there are only ten stories in the world? And, right now, you’re acting out one of them. But I will say this—at least your story has a different twist to it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “In your case, the writer’s fucking the producer. In my jaded experience, it’s always the other way around. So bravo—you’re defying the laws of Hollywood gravity.”

  “But Alison—it was you who got us together in the first place.”

  “Tell me about it. But don’t worry—I’m not going to demand my ten percent on your future joint earnings.”

  Alison did point out, however, that as Sally and I were now an item, it was best if we let the proposed Fox pilot (which I still hadn’t written) lapse.

  “It is going to look like her wedding gift to you—and I can just imagine some Peter Bart wannabe making a big issue out of it in Daily Variety.”

  “Sally and I have discussed this already. We agreed that it’s best if we forget the pilot for Fox.”

  “What charming pillow talk you must have together.”

  “It was over breakfast.”

  “Before or after working out?”

  “Why do I put up with you?”

  “Because, ‘as a friend’ I really am your friend. And also because I watch your back . . . to the point where the advice I have just given you is going to cost me almost forty grand in commission.”

  “You’re such an altruist, Alison.”

  “No—just plain stupid. Still, here’s one final piece of counsel from your ten percent big sister: Keep your head down in the coming months. You’ve had it too good recently.”

  I tried to heed her advice but Sally and I were playing the “power couple” game. We were “the perfect exemplars of the New Hollywood”: the sort of Ivy League, literate folk who also happened to thrive in the combustible world of television. Well-heeled but trying to look like we abhorred all ostentation. Our loft was minimalist in design; my Porsche and Sally’s Range Rover were symbolically astute vehicles—“upscale, but smart” cars driven by “upscale, but smart” people who had obviously achieved a significant level of professional success. We got invited to the right parties, the right premieres. But whenever I was interviewed, I spoke about how we weren’t seduced by the lure of celebrity or the need to maintain a high public profile. Anyway, we were both far too busy to crave the fast lane. Los Angeles is largely an early-to-bed city. So—with Sally planning the new comedy slate for the autumn, and with the second season of Selling You now deep into production—we hardly had time for social pursuits, let alone each other. And Sally, as I discovered, lived her life as if it were a perpetual time-and-motion schedule, to the point where, though she never said it, I knew that she had even silently scheduled three “lovemaking windows” per week. Even those random moments when she suddenly jumped my bones started to feel curiously premeditated—as if she had almost calculated that, on a rare morning when she wasn’t doing breakfast with someone, we could just about find the ten or so minutes required to reach mutual orgasm before she started her workout.

  Still, I wasn’t complaining. Because—bar the constant twinge of regret I felt about Lucy and Caitlin—everything was going my way.

  “We all should have your problems,” my new friend Bobby Barra told me on a rare late night (well, it was a Friday) when I drank one martini too many and confided in him that I was still being nagged with silent guilt about busting up my marriage.

  Bobby Barra loved the fact that I was using him as father confessor. Because that meant we were tight. And Bobby Barra liked the idea of being tight with me. Because I was now a name, a personage, one of the few true winners in a city of desperate aspiration and pervasive failure.

  “Look at it this way. Your marriage belongs to that segment of your life when nothing you did really worked. So naturally, you had to jettison it once you crossed over to the charmed side of the street.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said, sounding unconvinced.

  “Of course I’m right. A new life means new everything.”

  Including new friends like Bobby Barra.

  TWO

  BOBBY BARRA WAS rich. Seriously rich. But not “fuck you” rich.

  “What do you mean by ‘fuck you’ rich?” I once asked him.

  “You talking attitude or numbers?” he said.

  “The attitude I can figure out. Give me the numbers.”

  “Hundred mil.”

  “That much?”

  “It’s not that much.”

  “Sounds like enough to me.”

  “How many millions in a billion?”

  “Actually I don’t know.”

  “One thousand.”

  “One thousand million makes a billion?”

  “You’ve got the math.”

  “So a billion’s ‘fuck you’ rich?”

  “Not just ‘fuck you’ rich—‘fuck you and ten generations of your family’ rich.”

  “That’s pretty rich. But if you’ve only got one hundred mil . . . ?”<
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  “You can still say ‘fuck you’ but you’ve got to choose your audience more carefully.”

  “You must be ‘fuck you’ rich by now, Bobby.”

  “‘Fuck you’ adjacent.”

  “That sounds pretty good to me.”

  “It’s still not ‘fuck you.’ I tell you—you start hanging with the really big boys—Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Phil Fleck—and a hundred mil is kids’ stuff. A tenth of a billion. What’s that to guys who are worth thirty, forty, fifty bil?”

  “Chump change?”

  “Bingo. Chump-fucking-change. Nickel-and-dime productions.”

  I allowed myself a smile.

  “Well, speaking as a mere mortal who only earned a million last year . . .”

  “Yeah—but you’ll get there . . . if you let me help you.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Bobby Barra was full of advice when it came to the market—because that’s what Bobby Barra did for a living. He played the market. And he played it so well that now, at the age of thirty-five, he really was “fuck you adjacent.”

  What made his newfound wealth all the more impressive was that it was completely self-created. Bobby referred to himself as “the Dago from Detroit”: the son of an electrician at the Ford Dearborn plant who hauled himself out of Motor City as soon as he passed his driver’s test. Before that—at an age when most kids were thinking about the indignities of acne—Bobby was ruminating about high finance.

  “Let me guess what you were reading at age thirteen?” Bobby Barra asked me around the time we became friends. “John Updike.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “I’ve never worn a Shetland sweater in my life. But Tom Wolfe . . .”

  “That figures.”

  “And you? What were you reading at thirteen?”

  “Lee Iaccoca . . . and don’t fucking laugh.”

  “Who’s laughing?”

  “Not just Iaccoca, but Tom Peters, and Adam Smith, and John Maynard Keynes, and Donald Trump . . .”

  “Quite a cultural cross section there, Bobby. Do you think Trump ever read Keynes?”