Lala Pettibone's Act Two Read online

  They had reached the gate to the fourplex. Chuck and Stephanie were just at the door to their apartment, about to let themselves back into their home, as Lala and James and the dogs swarmed into the courtyard.

  Lala noticed a very suspicious and surprisingly cold look from both the young people before they each gave her a grudging wave and rushed to get the key into the lock so they could slam their front door shut behind them.

  Hello? Lala thought.

  “Yup,” she said to James. “It’s my biggest stumbling block in terms of anything. I’m tremendously lazy and unfocused, and I so rarely do the things I should to be as creative as I want to be. Or as successful. It takes me forever to finish a project. Years pass. And suddenly I’m in my forties. Sheesh.”

  James lifted Yootza out of Ruby’s carriage and carefully placed the dachshund back in his papoose. When his left hand once again grazed Lala’s right boob, Lala felt fairly certain that it had done so on purpose.

  “Take two aspirin,” James said.

  “Of course. And drink a large glass of water.”

  “Exactly. Then take a nap.”

  “Yup.”

  “And when you wake up, think about the advice I’m about to give you. I doubt this is advice I would give to a young writer. And that’s to your advantage and to the young writer’s detriment to a great extent, so do not be insulted that I’m making that distinction.”

  “Okay,” Lala said. “I won’t be. I think.”

  “You’ve got a co-op in the West Village that you’re renting out. You’re incredibly lucky. You don’t have to struggle for money as Hemingway and a million other writers have had to and will continue to have to.”

  Lala looked at James with more intensity than her mimosa-soaked brain should have made possible.

  He’s right, she thought. I am incredibly lucky.

  “God willing, you’ve got more than a few good decades left to your life, right?” James said. “But you also know that you might not because your husband died young, right? So you know each day is a gift. Really, it is.”

  “It is,” Lala said.

  “So my advice to you is have fun and write whatever you want, whenever you want. Really, write what you love to write. And then send it to me. It might be for shit. Or it might not. If it’s for shit, at least you’ll have had fun writing it. And your bills will still be paid by that co-op in the West Village. Man, if I were you, especially if my beloved spouse had died instead of leaving me for someone else, and, if I had what amounts to dynamite economic freedom, I would not do one damn thing unless I wanted to. Not one.”

  _______________

  Lala was asleep on the couch with the TV on when she was awakened by a gentle but insistent tapping on her front door.

  Maybe this should be the starting point for putting James’s excellent advice to good use, and I shouldn’t force myself to get up because I really don’t want to? Lala thought.

  “Lala?” a female voice outside her door said.

  “Are you alone? We don’t want to intrude,” a male voice said.

  What the fuck? Lala thought. Now my curiosity is piqued, damn it.

  She sat up. Yootza, who had been curled up next to Lala behind her bent legs in the small quadrangle that was created by Lala sleeping on her side with her face mashed into a pillow and a sizable portion of drool on the cloth beneath her face, rolled over onto his back and continued to sleep. Petunia and Chester, also not tremendously good watchdogs, did not stir from their repose on their beds on the floor next to the coffee table.

  The moment before Lala flung the door open, she glanced down at her body.

  Oh, okay, she thought. I’m not naked.

  Chuck and Stephanie were standing at her door. Stephanie was holding a large platter of cookies covered with clear plastic wrap.

  “I baked these, and I thought you might like some?” Stephanie said.

  Lala grabbed the platter, tore off the wrap, and seized a chocolate chip cookie. Then she didn’t so much eat the cookie as swallow it whole. She did the same thing to another cookie before she jerked her head toward the interior of her home and spoke through the third cookie, which she had decided to chew.

  “Wanna come inside? I think I’ve got milk in the fridge. I think. These cookies are amazing.”

  “We’d love to stay and chat, but we’ve got to get to the clinic,” Chuck said.

  “Just wanted to stop by to say hello,” Stephanie added.

  “Well, that’s very sweet,” Lala said. “Thank you very much for the wonderful cookies.”

  Lala expected that the next thing that she would do would be to close the door on their departing figures. But, because their figures made no move to depart, Lala stood there clutching the platter of treats and wondering if eating so many of them so quickly had been a good idea.

  At last, Stephanie spoke.

  “So how’ve you been? Must be lonely without Doctor David here, you know? Long-distance relationships can be really difficult, you know? We know, because we had a long-distance relationship when we were undergraduates, and it was really tough, you know?”

  What the fuck? Lala thought.

  She twisted her face into an inquisitive frown and stared at the two young people. They gazed back at her with wide-eyed innocence that was fierce in its earnestness.

  Wait, Lala thought. No, come on, seriously. How cute are these two?

  “Wait,” Lala said. “No, come on, seriously. How cute are you two? That person you saw me with is a potential publisher for the stuff that I’m not yet able to write with any consistency. Now, please understand that I think it’s very sweet of you to worry about David’s interests being protected, and I did mentally put ‘David’s interests’ in quotation marks, but David’s not in town. You do realize that, don’t you? If he were, this conversation might make a tiny bit of sense. But I do love you both for your naïve, protective hearts. Now get yourselves to your clinic and go save some animals’ lives before I throw up all over you. I definitely shouldn’t have eaten that many delicious cookies without breathing between bites. ‘Bites’ in quotation marks.”

  Lala shut her front door without waiting for the crazy, adorable youngsters to move. For all she knew, they would be standing out there for hours. She just couldn’t focus on that right now.

  “Well, I’m awake now,” Lala announced to her sleeping babies. “So maybe I feel like writing now? Maybe? Who knows? Let’s find out, shall we?”

  Lala went into her bedroom and unplugged her laptop. Back in the living room, she plugged it into another outlet and sat down next to Yootza.

  “Look,” she cheered. “It’s another episode of Tabatha’s Salon Takeover! I think I’ve only seen this one maybe two or three times! Cool!”

  Lala flipped open her laptop and accessed a new Word document by clicking on all the correct links. A vast expanse of empty, pristine white appeared on her screen.

  Yikes, Lala thought.

  “Shall we start writing that column idea we’ve been toying with?” Lala asked her snoring hounds. “And when I say ‘we’ of course I mean ‘I’ since I don’t imagine you guys toy with much other than thoughts of kibble past, present, and future. That’s not a criticism.”

  Lala typed the words, “Lala Pettibone, Journalist to the Stars.”

  “I’ve had this opening in my head for a while,” she told Petunia and Chester and Yootza. “I think I’ve almost got it memorized.”

  Lala read aloud as she typed.

  “The Cole Porter who opened the door to his palatial house on the rue Monsieur near Les Invalides was not the Cole Porter who would soon burst onto the international musical scene as a master of exquisitely crafted lyrics of surpassing wit and intelligence. The Cole Porter standing before me on a frigid, clear day in Paris was just another artist with terror in his heart, and a pen and pad i
n his hands. He shoved his pen sideways into his mouth and stuck the pad under his armpit so he could dramatically run his fingers through his hair and then clasp them together under my startled nose in the universal gesture of supplication. ‘Please tell me you can think of a word that rhymes with “bellicose.” Please. For the love of all that is sacred and profane, what rhymes with “bellicose”? I mean, besides “verbose,” of course. And “sucrose.” And “lactose.” And . . . Hey, I think I just solved my own problem. Come on in. Can I get you an aperitif?’”

  After several hours and many flipped premium cable channels, Lala had a first draft that she didn’t regard as entirely awful. She picked up Yootza and kissed his grey little snout. He didn’t open his eyes.

  “You know what I like about relatively short pieces?” she asked him. “They’re relatively short. Like you, you cute, little nugget of cranky! And like me.”

  _______________

  When Lala saw her aunt the next day, she didn’t mention anything about James other than that she had bumped into him.

  First Lala read her piece about interviewing Cole Porter aloud to Geraldine. She had revisited the piece again later the night before, after going out to get a big serving of twirled French Vanilla and Oreo Cookie frozen yogurt with huge servings of cookie dough chunks and cute, tiny, little chocolate caramel cups as toppings.

  “How can they make these little thingies so cute and small?” she wondered aloud as she heaped spoonful upon spoonful into her extra large cup of yogurt. “It’s like they’re candies in Lilliput. So damn cute!”

  The interview piece had ended up being much longer than Lala originally envisioned it. She had kept on writing until she didn’t feel like writing any longer. Geraldine listened to Lala’s reading with clear enjoyment and laughed at all the places where Lala had hoped she would laugh. When Lala was done, Geraldine applauded.

  “Lovely. I really enjoyed that. I think it should be a series.”

  “I was thinking that too!” Lala crowed. “I thought maybe I could—”

  “Excellent. That’s settled. So? James?”

  “He is a nice man. Very cute.”

  “Did you fuck him?” Geraldine asked. “I always feel so young and hip and wicked when I talk like that.”

  “He’s very nice. I’m not going to presume to speak for both of us, but I got the impression that we were both holding back. Yes, we did kiss at the door. With tongues. But in our defense, we had been drinking all afternoon. I think we both think it might be best to just stay friends. I have no actual idea why we think that would be best or, in fact, what I’m even talking about.”

  “So you didn’t fuck him?” Geraldine asked. “Why haven’t you fucked him yet? I am so wicked and sassy and youthful with that kind of mouth on me, don’t you think?”

  “Excuse me,” Lala said, “but last time I fucked someone, he left town. He fled. He put himself in exile. He banished himself.”

  “That wasn’t a cause and effect. If I’ve got this right, he had that trip planned before you fucked him, am I right? Is it just me, or do you never fuck people who live in the same time zone as you? I like that word, fuck! I do! I think it’s evocative, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” Lala said, “so while we’re on the subject of your new favorite word, did you fuck Monty?”

  “Oh yes,” Geraldine said. “Repeatedly. Often.”

  Lala did a visible double-take.

  “Why did you do a double-take?” Geraldine asked. “I don’t think I’ve said anything outlandish, have I?”

  “I . . . I don’t know why, but I just wasn’t expecting that answer. I was expecting to shock you out of your weirdness by, you know, turning the tables back on you.”

  “You might give me more credit,” Geraldine huffed.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . isn’t his leg still broken?”

  “It’s healing nicely. I do have to do most of the athletics so far, but Monty has promised to more than make it up to me when he’s completely back in form.”

  Every Cloud has What?

  Monty’s daughter Helene came down from Beverly Hills at least once a week to check on her dad. Almost every time she was in Manhattan Beach, she made a plan to see Lala. Often, Helene and Lala would have lunch with Geraldine and Monty, and afterward the two “youngsters,” as Monty affectionately called them, would go to a brand new bar downtown that looked like it belonged in Paris’s First Arrondisement, where Helene would order them bellinis with just a whisper of pêche in French that was perfect in accent and syntax.

  Damn, Lala would think as she sat at the bar during their Happy Hour soirée watching the handsome, young French bartender drown in the inexorable pull of Helene’s confident, faux-Gallic tide. She’s kind of annoyingly good at everything and kind of irresistibly fabulous to be around at the same time.

  After Lala returned home, Geraldine would hear her footsteps on the ceiling and would rush upstairs for a blow-by-blow.

  “I’ve been fucking Monty since we left lunch,” Geraldine announced when Lala opened her apartment door.

  “Yikes,” Lala said.

  “Indeed. So? How was Happy Hour?”

  “Fab-u-lous. Helene is really something. She is fab-u-lous.”

  “Just be careful,” Geraldine said. “I’m not entirely sure she’s as benignly perfect as you seem to think she is.”

  “Stop being so negative. Maybe you’re just jealous because Helene and I are such good buddies already.”

  Lala didn’t have much to offer besides those platitudes because she knew she was indeed in the early stages of a love affair powered by that heady feeling when someone cool and more successful than you are seems to like you and seems to think you’ve got talent. She approached her feelings about Helene with a level of awareness that might have earned professional and audience kudos on afternoon TV.

  “I’m not jealous,” Geraldine responded. “I’m just curious as to why you’re so taken with her.”

  “I think of it as a girl-crush, but I don’t know why I’m adding ‘girl.’ Maybe to disavow a sexual element. Which, by the way, I’m not entirely sure is not there. I mean, probably not, but, hey.”

  Years later, Lala would be convinced that Helene must have known how vulnerable and overly excitable Lala was back then.

  “Oh, Girlfriend loved having a new acolyte. And she’d be the first to admit that,” Lala would chuckle with abiding affection, but only after several snifters of expensive brandy, which would become Lala’s aperitif of choice when she entered her seventies. “She played me. Like a virtuoso, she plucked my strings. Tickled my ivories. Slapped my bass. You get where I’m going with this.”

  Monty had gotten tickets for a local theater production of Hairspray. He and Geraldine were planning a romantic dinner before the show, and then Monty wanted to take Geraldine out for cocktails at a nearby hotel after the show to celebrate his having stepped up from wheelchair to crutches.

  “And you know what that means,” Geraldine winked at Lala.

  “Yeah, I think I have some notion. So there’s no need to say it aloud because I’m pretty sure we’re thinking of the same general thing, so—”

  “It means soon Monty and I can fuck standing up!”

  “God, you get crazy when you’ve got a new boyfriend,” Lala said.

  “I know! I feel like a schoolgirl again. Like a nasty, dirty, little schoolgirl in love.”

  “Okay, enough,” Lala said.

  Lala assumed that Helene wouldn’t be in Manhattan Beach that Saturday since her dad was covered for the entire evening. So she was mildly surprised to get an e-mail from Helene asking her to come to dinner at Monty’s house for a special reason—she wanted ideas for her new novel.

  Lala was mildly surprised and massively panicked.

  “I’m not an idea person!” she wailed at her aunt.

&
nbsp; “Is she paying you?” Geraldine asked.

  “Of course not. What a silly question. I’m honored she asked me. This is what fellow writers do for each other. Or so I’ve heard. We get together, and we support each other by brainstorming ideas. Helene wouldn’t have asked me to help her think of ideas for her new novel if she didn’t respect me, right? I’ve got to come up with good suggestions. I want to be worthy of her respect.”

  “Really? Because then my next question has to be why you give a shit what Helene Miller thinks of you?”

  “Were you always so negative?” Lala demanded. “And if the answer to that is yes, why were my parents friends with you for so many decades?”

  _______________

  Oy, Lala thought. Look how fabulous she looks. After cooking. If I had been cooking anything? Anything. Scrambled eggs even. I would look like a wreck.

  “You shouldn’t have brought anything,” Helene said. She ushered Lala through the door and admired the bottle of red wine Lala handed her.

  “Stop. Like I’d come empty-handed. My mother would throw bolts of lightning down at me if I did that.”

  “Mine would, too,” Helene said. “I mean, at me. If I did that. Not at you. Come sit down. We’ll have some champagne with the appetizers and then open this delicious bottle with our dinner, and we can . . . Benedict, NO!”

  Lala saw a huge blur of black and white lunging at her across the entryway, and, before her brain could analyze the frenzied input, she was on the floor, and the Great Dane was on top of her. His tongue was large enough to saturate her entire face via repeated swipes of his saliva-drenched affection.

  Helene furiously yanked at Benedict’s collar, to no effect at all.

  “Bad boy! Bad! Get off her!”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” Lala giggled. She cheerfully gasped for air. “I love dogs. It’s great.”

  Lala rubbed the sides of Benedict’s neck. She gradually was able to get herself up on her elbows. She covered Benedict’s face and neck with hugs and kisses.

  “Who’s a good boy? Who is a good boy? Someone answer me right now.”