Standing Room Only Read online

  Lala Pettibone:

  Standing Room Only

  Heidi Mastrogiovanni

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York | Idaho

  Amberjack Publishing

  228 Park Avenue S #89611

  New York, NY 10003-1502

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Heidi Mastrogiovanni

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Mastrogiovanni, Heidi, 1957- author.

  Title: Lala Pettibone : standing room only / Heidi Mastrogiovanni.

  Description: New York : Amberjack Publishing, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017057661 (print) | LCCN 2018005271 (ebook) | ISBN 9781944995744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781944995737 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women authors--Fiction. | Man-woman relationships--Fiction. | Choice (Psychology)--Fiction. | Los Angeles (Calif.)--Fiction. | Paris (France)--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A819943 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.A819943 L35 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057661

  Cover Design: Mimi Bark

  For Tom

  Encore?

  An especially unsettling energy was making an unlucky section of the second floor hallways in one of the main buildings of Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California vibrate.

  Eliza in Accounting stood up in her cubicle and peered over the partition at Phillip, who wore headphones all day and hummed along to whatever he was listening to, which, if his aggressive “mmmm hmmmm mmmms” were any indication, was the entire songbook of a profoundly ill-tempered heavy metal band on a loop.

  “What is that freaky . . . Oh, for heaven’s sake, you can’t hear it, can you?”

  Eliza had taken an instant dislike to Phillip when his first words to her on his first day at work were, “What’s cookin’? Numbers, huh? Am I right? Numbers?”

  Just as she was about to sit down, Phillip caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye.

  “DID YOU SAY SOMETHING, ELIZA?” Phillip bellowed, not taking off his headphones.

  Eliza theatrically mouthed “NO!” and slammed herself back down into her chair.

  Had the Accounting Department been any closer to the ladies’ room, Eliza might have been able to hear blustering cries of distress, and she might have been able to make out identifiable sounds and individual words.

  “Would someone PLEASE tell me what sin I committed on the Ides of March in a past life that made this BLEEPING day hold such a BLEEPING grudge against me?” Lala Pettibone demanded.

  Lala’s new colleague, Zoe Koehler, a fellow Wesleyan graduate more than a few years Lala’s junior, paused in her frantic splashing of cold water all over Lala’s eyes and face and head and shoulders.

  “Why are you saying ‘bleeping’ instead of, well, what I assume should be ‘fucking’?”

  Lala grunted, imagining that her young friend hadn’t quite yet learned the proper etiquette of doing business.

  “I don’t want to seem unprofessional, even in the bathroom, Zoe.”

  “We’re in Hollywood,” Zoe said.

  She’s right, Lala thought. “You’re right. FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

  Lala’s anguish had begun only a few minutes earlier when she had entered the ladies room after being ushered there by a genial young man who wore black pants so tight as to make them flirt with the realm of leggings, and who had welcomed them at the reception desk with a perky “Hello! And whom do I have the pleasure of greeting today?”

  They were at the studio to discuss the possibility of Clive Ellis, acclaimed British actor and classic bad boy offscreen, starring in the film version of Lala’s very popular comedic novel, Dressed Like a Lady, Drinks Like a Pig.

  Zoe had met Lala at a Wesleyan alumni event in Beverly Hills and cornered her the moment she walked in.

  “I loved your book,” Zoe gushed.

  “Okay, and whoever you are, I love you,” Lala said.

  Zoe thrust out her hand and grabbed Lala’s.

  “Zoe Koehler,” she said. “Wesleyan class of—”

  “Oh, no, no, no, that’s okay,” Lala said, shaking her head violently. “Let’s go get a drink. I don’t need to know how young you are.”

  Lala and Zoe didn’t leave the bar area that night. They sat at a small high table by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a lovely view of the Beverly Hills Library and Civic Center.

  Lala’s feet did not reach the floor from the tall chairs that accompanied the high table unless she kind of sat/stood on the edge of the seat. When she was fully seated on the chair, Lala had to notice that she was not as tall as Zoe was standing.

  Oy vey, Lala thought. I look like a garden gnome next to her.

  Zoe told Lala all about growing up in New Hampshire and falling in love with movies when she first saw Now, Voyager, and as soon as she heard that, Lala suspected Zoe could quite possibly end up being one of her legion of adored adopted nieces and nephews.

  “Is that a movie about second chances, or what?” Lala said, spearing a very large olive from her very dirty vodka martini and ramming it into her mouth. “I absolutely identify with Bette Davis in that movie. I did not find my stride until my . . . well, the actual number of the decade isn’t important. What’s important is, it’s never too late. Trust me on this, my young friend, it is never, ever, ever, ever, ever too late. Thank goodness.”

  Lala told Zoe about being widowed at a far-too-young age and after that only dating men who lived in different cities, because she couldn’t imagine a full-time life with anyone but her beloved Terrence, but that was all subconscious and Lala wasn’t aware of it until her Auntie Geraldine had yelled it at her after losing patience with what Geraldine often described as “your ongoing crapfest.”

  “I’m so sorry you lost your husband,” Zoe said, rubbing Lala’s arm with care and affection. “Our glasses are empty. We shouldn’t be talking about this with empty glasses.”

  She is entirely my kind of niece, Lala thought. Done. I’ve adopted her.

  Lala told Zoe that her novel had originally been a screenplay that was eviscerated by a fellow Wesleyan graduate who was a literary agent, on the same day that Lala found out that the Frenchman who was her boss at the New York branch of a French publishing house, and on whom she had a wicked intense crush, “had a ridiculously fabulous girlfriend named Marie-Laure, can you believe anything so fabulous? And she’s gorgeous and charming and she’s around my age, so I can’t even hate him for picking someone your age over someone my age.”

  “Wow,” Zoe said. “I just want to keep rubbing your arm. Is that okay?”

  “It’s great,” Lala said. “And on that same day—and who would even put this shit in a book or a movie or an alternately dark and hilarious series that you binge-watch on cable, because who could believe this shit, because life is way crazier than fiction . . . I lost my train of thought . . .”

  “Something else awful happened on that same day?” Zoe prompted. “Wow, you can really drink f
ast. I’m getting you another one.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Lala said. She watched Zoe scoot over to the bar and saw the handsome young bartender smile at her.

  What a cutie pie she is, Lala thought.

  Zoe came back balancing another very dirty vodka martini that had been filled to almost over the brim and a very large bowl of popcorn.

  “Thank god,” Lala yelped. “A base! A starchy base for the booze! Yay!”

  “Yup,” Zoe said. She grabbed a big fistful of popcorn and chomped it down. “I learned the importance of that at an all-night protest on Foss Hill senior year. Okay, so, that shitty day, part three.”

  “Yeah,” Lala said. “So, then, get this: I go to the board meeting for my co-op building in the West Village, and I hear that we’ve all got to pay forty grand by the end of the week because the basement of the building is suddenly, like, some kind of contained post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. So I have to move across the country and live in a beautiful apartment in my adopted Auntie Geraldine’s fourplex in Manhattan Beach, and, by the way, I am now your adopted auntie, okay?”

  “That sounds great!” Zoe said. “Did you finish all the popcorn already?”

  “I like to fantasize that the word ‘savor’ was invented to describe how much I enjoy food. At any rate, having to leave my beloved Island of Manhattan turns out to be a good thing—forgive me, Gotham, for even saying that—because I am taking in a bundle renting my co-op to visiting tourists, and I was able to start a charitable foundation and make a lot of donations to support my priorities, which include the environment and education and most of all animals—”

  “I have seven rescued senior cats,” Zoe said.

  “WHAT?!” Lala gushed. The tight crowd of fellow Wesleyan graduates and their guests turned to look toward the direction of the outburst. Lala waved at them, bobbed her head, and grinned enthusiastically.

  “I’m taking a car service home, so it’s cool!” she declared. “Okay, so guess what? My specific passion is senior animals!”

  “OMIGOD!” Lala and Zoe said in unison.

  Lala told Zoe all about meeting Dr. David McLellan, a devastatingly handsome and entirely wonderful veterinarian whom she spent a delightful night “bonking like a lunatic. I mean, it’s like I was back in freshman year and I was going nuts in my dorm room in Butterfield C,” before he went on a months-long sailing trip with his sons, and all about David coming back to Manhattan Beach and moving in with her and her four rescued senior dogs, and about how life in Southern California was now absolutely lovely, and she felt a bit disloyal to her beloved Island of Manhattan, but she certainly intended to visit that unparalleled place at least once a year to spend quite a few tourist dollars of her own there.

  Zoe and Lala ordered their car services at the same time and headed in opposite directions. Zoe told Lala that she had bought a small, adorable little bungalow in South Pasadena, having timed it just right when the housing market was being kind and having saved the down payment from her excruciating but very lucrative first job out of college as a personal assistant to a world-class actor who was also a world-class tool.

  “Wow,” Lala said as they eyed Santa Monica Boulevard for their grey Honda Civic and black Toyota Prius, respectively. “That is impressive. Owning a home at your age. Kudos, dear niece.”

  “So, can I take you out to lunch next week and talk some more about getting the movie version of your hilarious novel made?”

  “We go out to lunch, I’m buying. That’s what aunts do,” Lala said. She waved frantically at two approaching cars. “Look! They’re here at the same time! I’m taking that as a very good sign for our new partnership!”

  Zoe had proved better than her pitch. She worked closely with Lala to encourage and elevate Lala’s adaptation of her rejected screenplay into a bestselling novel, back into a screenplay that would not suffer the same fate as Lala’s first attempt.

  They alternated working at Zoe’s house and at Lala’s apartment, because each viewed the visit to the other’s home as a superb opportunity to—in addition to getting work done—indulge an aching need to spend time with dogs and cats.

  Lala’s dogs—wonderful old souls who smelled quite ripe mere hours after their baths and who slept for the majority of any day and certainly right through each night—took to Zoe deeply and immediately. As did Zoe’s cats take to Lala.

  “Clever of you to name them after the Seven Dwarfs,” Lala said on her first visit. She was sitting on Zoe’s cute love seat in her clean but cluttered living room with all the cats walking over and around her and her laptop. The one named Grumpy wouldn’t stop swatting Lala’s shoulder and ear, something that Lala found quite charming. “What happens when you rescue another cat?”

  “I start on another list of characters,” Zoe responded. “I’m thinking the Seven Deadly Sins. Maybe I’ll go with Sloth for the first one.”

  “God, that is a fabulous idea,” Lala said. “Sloth. I love that. I may borrow your idea and name my next dog Gluttony. Do you have any more of these delicious stuffed olives? I can’t stop eating them.”

  After they went through five drafts and got feedback for each version from writers Zoe had worked with and respected, Zoe sent the screenplay to a friend from high school who was an administrator at William Morris Endeavor and got it to Clive Ellis’s representative at the agency.

  Zoe had gotten an e-mail from her friend that the screenplay was in the hands of Clive’s agent on a Friday. Lala and Zoe assumed that they would have to wait a long time for a response. The call from Clive’s agent’s assistant came on the following Monday. A meeting was set up for two weeks from that day.

  “Clive will be in town and he’d like to get to know you both a bit so he can see if maybe working together would be a positive experience all around.”

  “You are SHITTING me!” Lala had screamed when Zoe called to tell her the good news. “We have got to celebrate! Let’s go to that fancy-pants movie theater that I love in Old Town Pasadena. I don’t care what’s playing there!”

  “The one where you sit in cozy Barcaloungers and you can order delicious food and drinks and stuff and the tickets are outrageously expensive but the popcorn is free? I LOVE that place!”

  They went to a seven o’clock screening of a dopey college sex comedy that, after a non-stop series of mojitos because “I’m craving something minty fresh,” Lala deemed “one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. I mean, EVER! What did he just tell his brother? That his brother’s farts smell like Chinese food? That is comic GENIUS! God, I am SO happy about our MOVIE deal! I hope our movie turns out half as good as this one!”

  And now it was potentially all about to go down the crapper at Sony Pictures Studios because Lala had made the mistake of grabbing what she thought was a bottle of Visine from her purse and ended up drowning her eyes with the ear drops she picked up at the vet for her ancient beagle, Petunia, that morning.

  “We need to get going,” Zoe said. Lala straightened up and looked at herself in the mirror.

  “I think I may be having a major cardiac crisis,” Lala said. “Not really, though I do think I have a wicked case of heartburn brought on by sudden and excessive stress. And I look like shit,” she sighed. “You, on the other hand, look fabulous.”

  Objective reality indicated that Lala did not look like shit. She looked a bit wilted and a bit damp and a bit red and rubbed, but other than that, she was a very attractive woman.

  Objective reality also indicated that Zoe did indeed look fabulous. Lala suspected that Zoe was the kind of person who would look great at every stage of her hopefully long and happy life. She would remain accessibly beautiful because she had a warm, wide smile, porcelain skin with a cute smattering of freckles, and wavy, light auburn hair that was currently long and would probably look fabulous at whatever length and in whatever shade she would choose in the future. Zoe was a nice pers
on, and Lala knew that would make all the difference, all the time.

  “But we are strong, proud women. And we must never let it be about looks—”

  “We’re in Hollywood,” Zoe said. “It is about looks. And also talent. And also about being easy to work with. We’ve got all of that, partner. So let’s go show them how it’s done.”

  “Holy shit!” Clive Ellis said. “Are you okay?”

  He had opened the door to the small, sleek conference room and did a visible register of shock when he saw Lala’s pulsating neon eyes.

  Holy shit, Lala thought. He is even cuter in person. Damn it! Why do I look like this? Now I can’t flirt with him. Fine, fine, I’ll leave that for Zoe. Fine. Whatever.

  “I am absolutely fine, Clive,” Lala said, extending her hand. “What a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Jesus!” Clive fretted. “Sit down, please, sit. What happened to your eyes?”

  “Oh, allergies. No big deal at all. It’s not nearly as bad as it looks.”

  “Well, it couldn’t be, could it? Are you sure you’re okay?” Clive asked.

  “Yup,” Lala sighed.

  “If you need us to call 911 . . .” Clive continued.

  Sheesh, Lala thought. I couldn’t read the label? I couldn’t check to see if I was dousing my eyes with hound dog ear wax dissolver?

  “I’ll be sure to give a yell,” Lala said.

  “We don’t need to call 911,” a rather weaselly fellow sitting at the table grunted. “Let’s keep this all in-house, Clive.”

  “I’m absolutely fine. Really,” Lala said.

  “Okay. Then let’s get started. This is my manager, Garrett. And you must be Zoe. Sit, everybody, sit.”

  Lala and Zoe grabbed two plush chairs next to each other at the conference table opposite Clive’s manager.

  Garrett Olsen, a surly-looking beanpole who might have been Ichabod Crane’s twin, had apparently never met a tanning booth he didn’t like. He nodded at the two women and sneered a voiceless “Hello.”