Lala Pettibone's Act Two Read online

  “The red and the black. An homage to Stendhal and also the school colors of my alma mater. As you both have heard many times. I love you for always so cheerfully listening to Mama repeat herself. Did Mama ever tell you that Mama is self-conscious about many things, but her wide green eyes are not one of them? Did Mama ever tell you that her first boyfriend in college dubbed her eyes ‘just the right side of big and beautiful enough to approximate the unnerving stare of a lemur’? Which Mama chose to take as a high compliment.”

  Lala made big kissy noises in Petunia’s and Yootza’s ears.

  “I’ll leave the TV on Comedy Central. Don’t wait up. Auntie Brenda and I have lots of fun stuff to talk about.”

  _______________

  “Really? That’s great.”

  Brenda smiled at her best friend. Lala often described Brenda as “Effortlessly elegant . . . which just chaps the crap out of me, frankly. She makes it look so easy. She’s tall and she’s got gorgeous red hair and skin like cream and you know what else is really irritating? She never works out, but she always looks fabulous. God, I love her so much.”

  “I am at least as surprised as you are,” Lala said. “I have, and I’m thrilled to admit this, been feeling quite optimistic for rather a while now.”

  Lala grasped the large pitcher of Kick Ass Scratch Margaritas that was still a quarter full. She was about to refill their glasses when Felipe swooped over and gently seized the pitcher out of her hand.

  “I will do this. I will attend to my beautiful ladies.”

  He made a graceful circle in the air with the pitcher, weaving back and forth between their glasses, not spilling a drop of the precious liquid, until the brims were nearly submerged.

  “Merci mille fois, mon trésor,” Lala cooed. “As soon as I’m fluent in French, I’m starting on Spanish. In your honor, Felipe. Mon trésor.”

  Felipe smiled at Lala and Brenda, before running off to join a few other waiters who had just started singing “Happy Birthday” to a table full of young women. Lala and Brenda watched Felipe grab a pair of maracas and dance.

  “I realize a relationship with Felipe is probably not going to happen because of his age relative to mine, among a million other reasons,” Lala said. “But I would love . . . you know, just for one night . . . or maybe a weekend in Martha’s Vineyard . . .”

  “Ditto,” Brenda said. “In some alternate universe where I wouldn’t be cheating on Frank. Oh, Lala, I’m so happy for you. I think you’ve found your tribe.”

  “I think I have,” Lala said. “It’s been almost a year. Everyone is wonderful in the office.”

  “Some more than others, right?” Brenda said.

  “Some way more than others,” Lala agreed, and they both grinned conspiratorially.

  “We do lovely work there,” Lala continued. “I think I feel at home. Do not repeat this. Not even to me. Especially not to me. But sometimes I even think I may stop being a temp and accept their offer to go on staff.”

  “I don’t believe what I’m apparently hearing.”

  “Health insurance. Hello! How great would it be to not have to pay that on my own every month? And I don’t come home tired at the end of every day. I love writing and editing the commentary for the pictures. The books are lovely. And you know I have no visual sense whatsoever.”

  “None whatsoever,” Brenda said. “Not one milligram.”

  “And even I love the photographs. That’s how lovely they are. So I come home, and I feel great, and I’ve been able to write more than ever. I’m working on a trilogy of novellas centering around the theme of renewal.”

  “Cool,” Brenda said. Just as she sucked down the last of her drink, Felipe appeared as if the air around their table had miraculously created him—and another pitcher of Kick Ass Scratch Margaritas.

  “Are my beautiful ladies ready for more?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He made a big circle with the pitcher until their glasses were again full.

  Lala and Brenda watched him walk away.

  “In the scenario going through my mind right now,” Lala whispered, “I have the body I had when I met Terrence. But with bigger boobs.”

  “Yup,” Brenda said. “So, the truth. How much of your thoughts about maybe taking a full-time, regular job at the charming New York branch of Atelier du Monde has to do with your crush on your delicious boss and the possibility of maybe marrying him and living in Paris for half the year?”

  “Certainly no more than seventy-five to ninety percent. I don’t know. I just have a feeling about us. Destiny? I don’t know. Fate? He makes my heart go nuts.”

  “I’m so happy for you,” Brenda said. “Especially because for a long time there everything you touched turned to shit. It just broke my heart to see you trying and trying again and again to get away from working as a temp, and you never let me or Frank help you, and you know we always wanted to, and, God, you just had one nutty idea after another to try to make some money so you could write. In hindsight, that one about hawking the energy drink was so clearly a pyramid scheme. How much did you lose?”

  “I don’t remember,” Lala said through clenched teeth.

  “We were all so worried about you. It seemed like you were being followed by this dark cloud of absolute shit.”

  “I remember. I was there, remember? So maybe no need to remind me? But I guess it turns out that I am what I like to call—because it’s the best thing I can call myself at this point in my life—a late bloomer. A very late bloomer.”

  Lala suddenly got very quiet. She stayed that way for several long moments.

  “After all that lovely time with Terrence,” she finally whispered. “All those lovely years.”

  Brenda’s eyes welled up even as Lala’s did. Without looking at each other, they reached across the table and tightly grasped each other’s hands.

  “I was so lost for so long. But at least now I’m finally blooming, right?”

  _______________

  When Lala stumbled into her bedroom it was after midnight.

  Petunia and Yootza had apparently not moved a muscle since she’d left. They did lift their heads when Lala fell face forward onto the bed and landed nearly on top of them.

  “Shove over,” Lala muttered.

  Petunia and Yootza put their heads back down and didn’t move.

  “Mama’s sorry,” Lala mumbled. “Mama imagines that the smell of tequila on her breath must be unbearably vivid to a hound’s sensitive nose.”

  Lala hoisted herself to a seated position.

  “Mama’s going to eat a lot of vanilla ice cream. A ton. And Mama’s going to drink a lot of water, and Mama’s going to take two aspirins, or three if there are three in the bottle, because I don’t want the last one to feel abandoned, or else Mama will have a wicked hangover. And then Mama is going to take you for a nice, long walk.”

  Lala shuffled her way out of the bedroom. She grabbed a barstool from the counter that connected her cute, little kitchen with her cute, little dining area. Lala positioned the chair so she could sit in front of the open freezer door and eat the rest of an almost full container of Häagen-Dazs. The cold from the freezer was doing a very good job of helping her not pass out.

  Lala shoved ice cream into her mouth with a spoon and started to giggle.

  “This is why New York is so much better than LA,” Lala brayed toward the bedroom, presumably for the edification of her dogs. “You can drink to excess here, and you don’t have to worry about fiddling with an app to get a ride home. All you have to do is get to the curb, raise your hand, and mumble your address before you pass out in the backseat. Suck on that, City of Angels!”

  When it Rains

  Lala woke to the sound of her clock radio blaring liberal political opinions. She gingerly reached over to the nightstand and turned off the radio without lifting her head. Petu
nia was at Lala’s feet and was doing a passable imitation of a monster truck rally. Yootza had his head next to hers on the pillow. His snores were so delicate that they seemed like nothing more than sturdy breathing.

  Lala smiled.

  Wow, she thought. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I feel sick. Maybe I can risk trying to sit up.

  Fifteen minutes later, Lala rose, very tentatively, on her elbows.

  I don’t believe it, she thought. I think I’m not hungover.

  Lala carefully extracted herself from beneath Petunia’s chubby, beagle body. Petunia snorted and turned over on her back, her bent legs stuck up in the air. Lala slipped her feet into the slippers that awaited her on the floor. She stood up and, naked but for the slippers, sauntered toward the kitchen.

  The moment, the very instant that Lala’s right foot made contact with the tile on her kitchen floor, Petunia and Yootza came barreling around the corner like they were running the Iditarod.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhh!” Lala screamed joyfully with comic panic at the onslaught of dogs, as she did every morning.

  Petunia and Yootza pranced around in small circles. Lala pulled a covered container of kibble out of the cabinet. As always, Petunia started whining.

  “Hush,” Lala giggled as she doled out the kibble.

  The dogs inhaled their food. Lala flicked on the old CD player sitting atop the counter. A sonorous male voice intoned in a continental accent.

  “So, to review, the irregular subjunctive verbs include—”

  “Il faut que je sois . . .” Lala said. “Il faut que je puisse . . . Il faut que je sache.”

  Lala looked out the small window in her kitchen. The sky was crystal blue.

  “What a gorgeous day,” Lala said. She bent down and patted her dogs’ foreheads. “Everything. People, everything, is coming up roses for me and for you.”

  _______________

  “Bonjour, tout le monde!”

  Lala’s surging energy almost made her float into the open, welcoming floor plan of offices and conference rooms that was the US outpost of Atelier du Monde. She had walked from her place to the Chelsea location, and the air was crisp without being a bit cold. She had lifted her face to the sun, and, at one point, she almost smashed into a pretzel vendor’s cart, but even the near miss with flying rock salt had not dampened her enthusiasm for life.

  Everyone who heard her come in smiled at her and waved or spoke a warm greeting. Lala sidled into her chair and turned on her computer. Her desk was impeccable. There was a small, framed photo of Petunia and Yootza next to the phone.

  She checked her e-mail and learned that there was going to be a staff meeting at two o’clock. And that the New York partners of the firm had been toying with the idea of instituting a Blue Jean Fridays policy but had scrapped that in favor of letting everyone wear jeans “whenever you lovely people want to.”

  What a swell place to work, Lala thought, smiling.

  Lala’s cousin’s 20-year-old daughter had visited her from London a few months earlier, and they had gone shopping at Banana Republic. Much to Lala’s shock and against the experience of almost three decades of not being able to find a pair of jeans that made her look good—and that she could also stand to wear because they weren’t constantly riding up her crack—Ava had picked out a pair that were not only on sale and comfortable, but made Lala look at least ten pounds thinner.

  “It’s a miracle,” Lala gasped when she tried them on. “It’s almost unholy what a miracle this is. I’m in a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and fluorescent lighting, and I don’t want to asphyxiate myself. I’m telling you, the devil is involved in this in some capacity.”

  I’ll wear my new jeans tomorrow, Lala thought. And I will sashay my denim-encased tuchus past a certain Gallic Adonis’s office on an unending loop until he runs out and grabs my ass and covers it with kisses. What a great day this is already turning out to be. What a great year this is promising to be. What a great life this still might end up being.

  Lala pulled up the document she had been working on for a few weeks. Each page had a photo of one of the exquisite pieces in a collection amassed by a very old, very wealthy woman who lived in Montreal. The pieces were all miniature creations rendered in jaw-dropping detail. Everything in the woman’s collection balanced delightfully between majestic and whimsical and no detail of reality was spared. Here was a photo of a teeny little version of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Here was the Oval Office scaled to the size of a cereal box with a correspondingly small, but no less lifelike, replica of President Barack Obama. Then turn the virtual page to find a snapshot of ye olde curio shoppe in Tudor England, no bigger than a laptop.

  Where’s my thesaurus? Lala fretted. I’ve got to choose at least thirty other ways to say “adorable” before lunch.

  Suddenly she froze. It had become challenging to breathe. She didn’t have to look up to know he was there.

  “Ça va?” Gérard Courtois, Vice President of Atelier du Monde, asked.

  His height really was average. He was in very good shape, but not so muscular that you would want to purse your lips with a bit of patronizing disdain for the assumed oafishness that was unfairly associated with steroid use. His grayish-blond hair was closely cropped, as though he might have just been cast to play Caligula.

  Lala thought he was the sexiest man she had met in a very long time. Maybe since Terrence.

  “Ça va très bien. Et toi?”

  I can’t believe we’re using the familiar form of “you,” Lala marveled for the nine millionth time since her boss had suggested they not “stand on the ceremonies” now that she was learning French. I can freakin’ not fathom how to get this stupid grin off my face. He must think I’m possessed.

  “Très bien. I love what you’ve done with the World of Miniatures so far. I had no idea there were so many ways to convey ‘adorable’ in English.”

  “It’s a rich language, isn’t it?”

  “Very rich.”

  Gérard paused. Lala searched her brain for something charming to say and found that her library of flirtatious quips had apparently been erased by a wave of sheer lust.

  Damn, Lala thought. I got bupkis here.

  “Well.”

  “Well,” Lala echoed.

  “I’ll let you get back to a Piazza San Marco that could fit in my pocket, shall I?”

  “Yup,” Lala said, smiling.

  Lala watched Gérard’s retreating back.

  Is that a famed Venetian public square in your pocket, Lala thought, or are you just happy to see me? Je t’adore, Gérard. Je t’adore toujours.

  _______________

  Lala sat at the sumptuous oak conference table in the corner room. People were just starting to trickle in for the meeting. Next to her was Adele, the office manager, who bore a startling resemblance, at least in Lala’s mind, to Gloria Steinem, both physically and in terms of her grace and grit. Adele was the big sister Lala never had. Though they didn’t socialize outside the office, Lala was crazy about Adele. Lala hoped, dreamed, doubted that one day she could walk with as much confidence as Adele always did.

  The two women stared at the other table in the room, which was decked out for a celebration. In the center of the overflowing display of food stood an excessively large bottle of champagne.

  “You really don’t know what this meeting is about?”

  “I really don’t,” Adele said. “They didn’t even ask me to arrange the catering. Apparently Gérard handled it all himself.”

  Wow, Lala thought. Could . . . no . . . maybe . . . why not? Will Gérard be making a public declaration of his simmering love for me? A bold announcement? An irresistibly romantic proclamation? One that I wouldn’t even think about trying not to succumb to? Immediately, right here on top of this table? Because if that’s the case, I’m drinking all that champagne
by myself. Wow. Maybe he really is going to . . .

  Lala tilted her head, much the way her beagle Petunia tilted her head when Lala asked her if she was Mama’s precious baby girl in a grating singsong voice, and considered the possibility.

  Hey, Lala thought. Stranger things have happened.

  The room had filled up, and all twenty or so of Atelier du Monde’s New York staff were assembled. Gérard entered with a woman Lala had never seen before.

  The woman might have been a few years older than Lala. Or a few years younger. Either way, she looked terrific. She had let her hair go gray. She wore it short and swept dramatically to the side. Her black pants and white top and black and white scarf looked quietly expensive. Her jewelry was minimal, and Lala thought she could hear the earrings and bracelet whispering, in a French accent without condescension or a hint of ego, “If you have to ask, ma chere, you can’t afford us.”

  Gérard cleared his throat. Everyone quieted down and gave Gérard and this mystery woman their full attention.

  “I’m going to keep this brief because we have a lot of champagne to drink,” Gérard began.

  Everyone chuckled. The ol’ reliable, big, goofy, stupid grin attached itself to Lala’s face.

  He is so funny, she thought. And so charmant!

  “I would like to introduce you all to Marie-Laure Dermond. We have, after many, many, many months of pleading, spirited her away from Paris Match, and she will be our new Director of Marketing. Please join me in welcoming her.”

  Everyone applauded. Marie-Laure smiled graciously.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much,” she said. “I am delighted that Gérard has placed his confidence in me, and I am delighted that I will be working with you. Gérard tells me that you are all the best in the business. I hope that I will live up to your excellent examples. Now, enough speeches. Let us get drunk, oui?”

  “Whoa,” Lala whispered to Adele. “My kinda gal.”

  Everyone stood up from the table and started mingling. Lala and Adele headed for the champagne.