Lala Pettibone's Act Two Read online

  “He loves you,” Helene said. “He can’t stand me.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure he loves you.”

  Lala got herself to her feet. Benedict leaned his big head against her outer thigh, and Lala cradled his jowls in her hand.

  “Nope,” Helene said. “I’m not comfortable around dogs. I think the big oaf knows that.”

  “Well, yeah, he probably does.”

  “I just think pets are so messy,” Helene said. “You want to go freshen up?”

  When Lala came out of the downstairs guest bathroom—happy that Helene had suggested she pay it a visit because her image in the mirror had shown a woman who had just been hit by a runaway delivery truck ferrying beer gone sour—Helene was sitting on the sofa opening a bottle of champagne. Benedict was not to be found.

  “I put the monster in an upstairs bedroom, so he won’t bother us. Oh! There’s that happy sound!”

  The cork hit the ceiling, and Helene filled two glasses.

  “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking. Let’s get the work part of the evening out of the way before we get drunk, yes?”

  Lala sat next to Helene. Helene clinked her glass against Lala’s.

  “To the beauty of words.”

  “Yeah,” Lala said. “Yup. Uh huh.”

  Why am I so nervous? Lala thought. Keep that champagne comin’, Helene.

  Helene placed her glass on the coffee table next to an array of appetizers that were arranged in a lovely pattern emphasizing the harmonious balance of their variety of colors and sizes and shapes.

  It all looks fucking gorgeous and delicious, Lala thought. If I served appetizers, they’d be guacamole in a bowl, salsa in a bowl, and a big bowl of chips. Which is actually quite delicious, when you think about it. God, why is Helene so fucking perfect? Please, let her have some sinister secret that she spills over dinner. Please.

  Helene took a laptop off the seat of the chair next to her. She lifted the screen and began typing.

  “Okay, so I have my protag with . . .”

  My what? Lala thought. What, words are suddenly becoming too long for us? It’s protagonist, cookie. Jesus!

  “. . . the person the reader thinks up until now is my villain locked in the wine cellar of a mansion on Lake Como. They were married once, many years ago, when they were just kids.”

  Wow, that sounds good, Lala thought. It’s clever. I want to find out what happens next. Damn it. Damn her.

  “We’ve just learned that the person who has been stalking Brenda . . .”

  Ohh, that’s nice of Helene, Lala thought. No. Wait. She doesn’t know Brenda. So it can’t be a conscious nod to my best friend. Never mind.

  “. . . is not her ex-husband, Claudio, but in fact Claudio’s second wife, the seemingly kind, but actually quite evil, Sophia. So what I would like us to brainstorm is what happens between Brenda and Claudio while they’re in the basement, and how they get out.”

  I am fucked, Lala thought. If I have any kind of an area of storytelling expertise, this is not it. I hate conflict. And I don’t know how people get out of situations. God, I’m schvitzing.

  “Well, ummm, maybe . . . uhhhh . . . and I don’t know . . . of course . . . what your . . . ummm . . . tone has been in the novel up to that point . . . and I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m . . . not a student or even really a fan of mysteries per se, sorry, but maybe, this would be the place to insert a little humor?”

  Helene peered at her.

  Barf, Lala thought. She’s looking at me like I just suggested a plot twist hinging on subterranean snail racing in Lombardy. Told in real time.

  “You know, get a little Hitchcockian. With maybe some elements of schmutz, too.”

  “Sure, let’s explore that,” Helene said.

  “Because . . . because . . . because, if I were Brenda and I thought I might be about to die in a basement, I would definitely get drunk on all the wine down there, and I would find something, scratch that, someone to have sex with.”

  Helene typed and nodded.

  “And maybe you could have Sophia watching them on hidden, closed-circuit TV or whatever the twenty-first century equivalent of that is.”

  “Okay,” Helene said. She continued to type and bob her head.

  Thinking on her ass, Lala scrunched into the cushions of the couch and, gulping champagne as she spoke, wove a story of two people who had been apart for years, and, in the course of a night that they thought would be their last on earth, told each other everything that had happened in their lives after they split up. And then fucked. Repeatedly.

  “And then maybe, I don’t know, maybe after they’ve been bonking each other, Sophia can go completely crazy because the protag . . . onist . . . has won because it’s clear to Sophia that Claudio never stopped loving Brenda, and so Sophia speaks to them via intercom, or whatever the modern equivalent of that is, and she curses their love, and then she floods the wine cellar with a deluge of priceless Bordeaux, and Brenda and Claudio are trying to stay afloat and are clinging to each other as the exceptionally delicious red wine threatens to rise right up to the high ceiling of the cellar.”

  “That would be very cool,” Helene said. She smacked and smacked the keys of her computer. Lala stood and began pacing the room. Several long moments of relative silence ensued as no additional words were spoken, and the only sound was the rhythmic thud of Helene’s fingers on the laptop as she caught up with everything Lala had been saying to that point.

  When she had gotten everything down and had tapped the “Save” key, Helene looked up at Lala with eager expectation. Lala stopped pacing.

  “Yeah. No. As to how they’re going to get out of the wine cellar, I don’t have a fucking clue. I got nothin’. Maybe the local gendarmes, or whatever they call the police in Italy, bust open the door.”

  Helene shut her laptop and stood.

  “No problem. I’ll figure something out. You’re good at this! I really appreciate your help. Come on, let’s go stuff ourselves.”

  Dinner was delicious but, to Lala’s great dismay, contained no revelations of hidden deeds from Helene’s past. Just stories of a happy life that was only darkened when her parents decided to adopt “that drooling beast.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Benedict makes my dad so happy, and I’m glad he’s such good company for my dad, but yuck with the saliva and the shedding and the farting and all that old dog stuff that goes on.”

  Helene, Lala discovered, had never married, but had a long history as a serial monogamist. And it was apparently Helene who always did the breaking up.

  “Gérard was lovely, but . . .”

  What? Lala thought. Okay, sure, what are the odds, but WHAT?

  “Was Gérard a publisher?”

  “No, he was a racecar driver,” Helene said.

  Oh. Okay. Wait! Do I know for sure that my Gérard never competed in the Grand Prix?

  “Short? Sexy? Irresistible?”

  “Yes, sexy, yes, irresistible, but very tall. Could-have-been-a-basketball-player tall.”

  Oh, okay, Lala thought.

  “He desperately wanted to marry me, but I had plateaued at that point in our relationship. It was time for me to move to the next level in my life. So I spent a year as a fundraiser-slash-hands-on-lay-person-assistant . . .”

  A what? Lala thought.

  “. . . for Doctors Without Borders.”

  Oy, Lala thought. Can’t fault her for that. She is something, this gal.

  Helene insisted that Lala take some brownies home with her. At the door, Helene kept shoving a big plate covered with aluminum foil into Lala’s hands, and Lala kept shoving it back.

  “I can’t! They’re delicious, and I need to lose weight, so I can’t. Thank you for a lovely evening. Keep your delicious darn brownies!”

&
nbsp; “You look great. You don’t need to lose weight. I can’t thank you enough for helping me with my new manuscript. Oh, and listen, you’re coming to my house in LA on the fifteenth. I’m having a book release party. And one of my favorite authors is going to be in town, so it’s going to be a really great evening. He’s an old friend from graduate school. I don’t know if you’ve read A Map Without Latitude?”

  _______________

  Lala was on the couch in her sweats with the plate of brownies balanced next to her laptop. The three dogs were staring at her from their various perches with agonized expressions.

  “Of course you can’t have any. It’s chocolate. Not good for dogs. And you just had dinner. Like I’m one to talk. Christ, these are delicious.”

  I am just not going to think about meeting Jackson Platt, Lala thought. I’m just not going to fantasize about him falling in love with me and marrying me and us being deliriously happy authors together with a big office in our gorgeous house with huge and fabulous desks next to each other where we create brilliant work and interrupt our days of dedicated wordsmithing only to bonk or go out for lunch. I’m not going to imagine all the wonderful trips we’ll take together, when we’re married, to book fairs in delightful locations. I’m not going to think about any of this, because if I do, I might freak out and spontaneously combust.

  Lala stared off into space. She fantasized about meeting Jackson Platt and marrying him and having epic sex with him. For all she knew, she might have been sitting that way, with her eyes nearly rolling back in her head, for hours. It was Petunia’s mournful whining that brought her back to the immediate world.

  Okay, Lala thought. I am going to have to forbid myself from indulging in any of that obsessive thinking before our fateful, on-a-par-with-Zhivago-in-terms-of-sweeping-romance meeting. Because I seriously do not think the centers in my brain that govern lust can preside over this kind of pornography without short-circuiting the entire grid.

  Lala patted Petunia’s head and turned on the TV.

  “My evening with Helene has resulted in me being a strange mixture of inspired and depressed,” Lala told the dogs. “Ahhh. I get it. So this is the ambivalence my therapist was yapping about for all those years. Shush, Petunia. You are not getting any brownies. End of discussion. I will eat them all myself, if I have to, just to shut you up.”

  Lala methodically put one brownie after another into her mouth in succession until the plate was empty. She then presented the plate to the dogs. The three hounds jostled each other to passionately inspect the crockery with their noses. The three sets of nostrils worked overtime, until it was clear to Petunia, Yootza, and Chester that not even a crumb remained. At which point all three sulked off. Not even Yootza remained on Lala’s lap, so profound was their shared feeling of disappointment and betrayal.

  “Never let it be said that I will not make myself physically sick to make a point,” Lala declared to their retreating hindquarters.

  Lala settled deeper into the couch.

  “Well. Okay,” she announced to the empty room. “Television’s on. Low. In the background. Can’t really hear it, but it’s there in case the pressure of producing words makes me freak out. Because, damn it, Hemingway wrote in a café that must have been noisy and crowded for at least part of the day, so I think that my choice of workspace is certainly valid.”

  She suddenly turned and yelled in the direction of the hallway down which the dogs had just retreated.

  “You guys, get back in here, so I’m not talking to myself and sounding crazy because I’m talking to no one!”

  Lala opened her laptop and clicked on a Word file. MyNovelFromMyScriptWhoGivesAShitWhatHappensIAmHappyNow.doc opened and Lala stared at the resulting letters on the screen. The document was what she had renamed DressedLadyNovel.doc in the hope of starting each work session with a defiant giggle.

  “I am both overwhelmed by the prospect of writing a novel and oddly champing at the bit to really get started on this thing. To go for broke. To give it my all. To . . . to . . . I’m fresh out of clichés.”

  Lala stared at the screen.

  “Maybe I’ll spend some time with the pieces of the story. Because pieces are shorter and so maybe they won’t scare me as much as an entire novel. Pieces. Yeah. Pieces that connect. You know, pieces in a row. You know, like a series . . .”

  She suddenly whipped her head back toward the hallway.

  “You guys, I am not kidding! Get back in here and sit with Mama so Mama can talk to you so Mama doesn’t start thinking she might be a crazy person!”

  _______________

  In the future, when she was feeling introspective or nostalgic or potted, Lala would observe that it’s kind of amazing how, with a new friend, everything can go to shit in a heartbeat. Or in the course of one hellish evening.

  “I was on a losing streak back then where the ides of any given month would screw up my life somethin’ wicked,” Lala would explain to one of the many young people in her older life that she had de facto adopted as her grandchildren. “Of course, much of the crap could be said to be my own fault, and, on several levels, it wasn’t anything more than I deserved. To this day, I’m still amazed that Brenda forgave me. I don’t know that I would have forgiven her if she had behaved like quite as much of a royal twat as I had. Of course, it probably helped that I didn’t give Brenda all the gruesome details of what a lousy friend I was for that particular episode. Sweetheart, go and fix Grandma Lala another martooni, wouldja? Thanks, precious.”

  Just a few days after Helene invited Lala to her book signing party, Lala came home after the morning walk with the dogs and checked her e-mail. There were several e-mails from Brenda’s account, all of them with subject lines in screaming capitals with aggressive and relentless punctuation.

  OPEN THIS RIGHT AWAY!

  ARE YOU AWAKE YET?!

  WHY AREN’T YOU AWAKE YET?!

  CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU WAKE UP!!!

  I HATE THIS DAMN TIME DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE COASTS!!!!!!!!!

  Omigod, is someone sick? Lala thought. Is someone dying?

  She frantically clicked on the first e-mail. In it, Brenda joyfully announced that she was going to join Frank on a trip west because he had to attend a conference in San Diego, and so she would be in Southern California for just one night, and she had searched all the spas in the area so she and Lala could have a Gals’ Night of pampering while Frank talked about concrete and dry wall with his fellow construction moguls.

  Ohhhhh, WOW, this is wonderful! Lala thought as she read. It’s going to be so great to see Brenda and . . .

  The phone rang. Lala had left the receiver in the cradle in the other room. She waited to hear who was calling before she ran to answer, so she could finish Brenda’s first e-mail.

  “. . . so don’t plan anything for the fifteenth, okay, because you and I are going to . . .” Lala read.

  Shit, Lala thought.

  There was a beep on the answering machine, and Brenda’s loud and enthusiastic voice swept over the entire apartment.

  “Are you awake? Why aren’t you awake yet? Wake UP!”

  Shit, Lala thought.

  “Read my e-mails! And call me A.S.A.P. I can’t wait to see you!”

  Seriously, shit, Lala thought. Okay, okay, okay, okay, think . . . I can’t call her now . . . I can’t. What the barf am I going to do about this?

  Lala stood.

  “Right,” she said. “I can’t figure this out now. I cannot. Must go to gym. Must put in several hours volunteering at rescue group. Must take barge cruise down sunny river of distraction. Must.”

  When Lala returned home nearly eight hours later, having, in the interim, called Geraldine to ask her to please walk her puppies, it was still early enough in New York that if she e-mailed Brenda instead of calling her, Brenda would smell a big, fat, smelly rat.

  Go
d, I am a horrible person, Lala thought. I can’t not meet Jackson Platt. I just can’t. Sheesh. I hate myself.

  Lala didn’t bring her laptop with her to the couch when she sat down to watch all the episodes of Tabatha’s Salon Takeover that she had recorded.

  “Like I could write one word that wasn’t selfish, self-serving crap designed to justify my selfish, self-serving plans,” she explained to her dogs. “What do you want to bet that if I were to try writing anything, I would end up giving one of my characters a monologue about how she just had to blow off her best and most wonderful and kindest and most generous and caring friend to indulge in a fantasy that had existed since she first turned the first pages of A Map Without Latitude? Don’t take that bet. Trust me. It’s a sucker’s bet.”

  When it was finally, almost midnight West Coast time, and Lala could reasonably maintain that she hadn’t wanted to risk waking Brenda, Lala got her cell phone and her laptop and brought them over to the couch.

  There were eight messages from Brenda on her phone.

  I’ll listen to them tomorrow, Lala thought.

  There were five new e-mail messages waiting for her.

  WTF?!

  ARE YOU SLEEPING ALL DAMN DAY?!

  I JUST CALLED GERALDINE, AND SHE SAID YOU’VE BEEN OUT ALL DAY! DAMN IT!

  WELL, OF COURSE I’M GLAD YOU’RE NOT DEAD, BUT, JESUS!

  WHY AREN’T YOU CHECKING YOUR VOICEMAIL?!? GODDAMN IT!!!!!!!

  I just have to do this, Lala thought. I just have to get this over with, and then I just have to figure out how to make amends and how to make this right and how to make up for being such a completely colossal lust whore . . . after Jackson Platt asks me to marry him. I hope Brenda will forgive me in time to be my matron of honor.

  Lala bunched up and then stretched her fingers and then interlaced them and stretched them away from her body palm-side outward with an overindulgence in exaggerated comic repetition that would have been more than welcome in any Saturday afternoon cartoon classic from her childhood. She placed her fingers—steeled for battle as they now were—on the keyboard of her laptop as though she were about to play a discordant symphony. And then she just as quickly removed her fingers.