Heartbeat (2 page)

“I'm sorry.” He tried to force himself to stay calm and reason with her. “I know I've been wrapped up in the show for the last three years, but I felt I needed to control it. If I let it get completely out of my hands, if I let someone else do it, they could have cheapened it, they could have turned it into one of those ridiculous, trite, maudlin soaps that make your skin crawl. I couldn't let them do that. And the show
does
have integrity. Whether you admit it or not, Les, that's what people have responded to. But that doesn't mean I have to sit on top of it forever. I think in California things will be very different …more professional …more in control. I should be able to get away from it more often.” He only wrote occasional segments now. But he still controlled it.

Leslie only shook her head with a look of disbelief. She knew him better. It had been the same when he was writing his early plays. He worked for two months straight without taking a break, barely eating or sleeping or thinking of anything else, but that had been only for two months and
in
those days she still thought it was charming. It no longer was. She was sick to death of it, sick of the intensity and the obsessiveness, and his mania for perfection. She knew that he loved her and the boys, but not the way she wanted him to. She wanted a husband who went to work at nine o'clock, and came home at six, ready to talk to her, to play with the kids, to help her cook dinner and take her to a movie. Not someone who worked straight through the night and then rushed out of the house exhausted and wild eyed at ten a.m. with an armload of memos and edicts and script changes to deliver by rehearsal at ten-thirty. It was too much, too exhausting, too draining, and after three years she'd had it. She was burnt-out, and if she ever heard the words
A Life Worth Living
again, or the names of the characters he was constantly adding and subtracting, she knew she would have hysterics.

“Leslie, give it a chance, baby, please …give
me
a chance. It'll be great in L.A. Just think of it, no more snow, no more cold weather. It'll be great for the boys. We can take them to the beach … we could have a pool right in our backyard … we can go to Disneyland. …” But she was still shaking her head. She knew him better.

“No, I can take them to Disneyland and the beach.
You'll
be working all the time, you'll either be up all night writing someone out of the show, or running in for rehearsal or to watch them air, or frantically rewriting something else. When was the last time you took the boys to the Bronx Zoo, or anywhere for that matter?”

“All right …all right … so I work too hard …so I'm a terrible father … or a bastard or a rotten husband or all of the above, but for chrissake, Les, for years we were starving to death. And now look, you can have anything you want, and so can they. We can send them to decent schools one day, we can give them everything we wanted to, we can send them to college. Is that so terrible? So okay, we've had a few hard years and now it's going to get better. And now you're going to walk out before it does? What timing.” He stared at her, tears brimming in his own eyes as he held out a hand to her. “Baby, I love you …please don't do this …” But she didn't move toward him, and she lowered her eyes so she couldn't see the pain in his. She knew he loved her, and she knew better than anyone how much he loved the boys. But it didn't matter. She knew that, for her own sake, she had to do what she was doing. “Do you want to stay here? I'll tell them we won't move the show. If that's what this is all about, to hell with California …we'll stay here.” But a note of panic had crept into his voice as he watched her, sensing that California was not the issue.

“It won't make any difference.” Her voice was low and soft, and she was very sorry. “It's too late for us. I can't explain it. I just know I have to do something different.”

“Like what? Move to India? Change religions? Become a nun? How different is teaching at Juilliard? What are you saying to me, dammit? That you want out? What the hell does that have to do with Juilliard or California?” He was hurting and confused and suddenly, finally, he was angry. Why was she doing this to him? What had he done to deserve it? He had worked hard, done well, his parents would have been proud of him if they'd been alive, but both had died when he was in his early twenties, of cancer, within a year of each other, and he had no siblings. All he had was her and the boys, and now she was telling him that they were leaving, and he was going to be alone again. All alone, without the three people he loved, because he had done something wrong, he had worked too hard and been too successful. And the unfairness of what she was doing to him made him suddenly burn with fury.

“You just don't understand,” she insisted limply.

“No, I don't. You're telling me you won't come to California. So I'm telling you that if it makes a difference, we'll stay here, and to hell with what the network says. They'll have to live with it. So what now? Where do we go from here? We go back to the way things were, or what? What's happening, Les?” He was torn between anger and despair and he wasn't sure what to say to her to change it. But what he hadn't understood yet was that she had made up her mind, and there was no way now to dissuade her.

“I don't know how to say this to you. …” Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at him, and for an instant he had the insane feeling that he had walked into one of his own shows and couldn't get out now …would Leslie leave Bill? …can Bill really change? …does Leslie really understand how much Bill loves her? …He wanted to laugh suddenly, or cry, but he did neither. “It's over. I guess that's the only way to say it. California doesn't have anything to do with it. I just haven't wanted to admit it to myself until now, and now I have. I can't do this anymore. I want my own life, with the boys. I want to do my own thing, Bill …without living with the show day and night …” And without him. But she couldn't bring herself to say it. The look of pain in his eyes was so overwhelming, she thought she might faint just looking at him. “I'm sorry. …”

He looked as though lightning had just struck him. He was deathly white, and his eyes were big and blue and filled with anguish. “You're taking the boys?” What had he ever done to deserve that? They both knew that, no matter how busy he had been for the past three years, he adored them.

“You can't take care of them by yourself in California.” It was a simple statement as he stared at her in horror.

“No, but you could come with me to help.” It was a weak joke, but neither of them felt like joking.

“Bill, don't …”

“Will you let them come out to see me?” She nodded, and he prayed that she meant it. For a moment, he thought of abandoning the show, staying in New York, and begging her not to leave him. But he also sensed that no matter what he did now, it was too late for her. In heart and soul and mind, she had already left him. And what he reproached himself for now was not having noticed sooner. Maybe if he had, he could have changed things. But now, he knew her well enough to know he couldn't. It was all over, without a whimper or a wail. He had lost the war long since and never known it. His life was over.

The next two months were an agony that still made him cry when he thought of it. Telling the boys. Helping them move to an apartment on the West Side before he left. His first night alone in the loft without them. Again and again, he thought of giving up the show, and begging her to take him back, but it was clear that the door was closed now, never to be reopened. And he discovered, before he left, that there was another teacher at Juilliard whom she was “very fond of.” She hadn't carried on an affair, and Bill knew her well enough to believe that she had been faithful to him, but she was falling in love with the guy and that was part of her reason for leaving. She wanted to be free to pursue her relationship with him without guilt, or Bill Thigpen. She and her teacher friend had everything in common, she insisted, and she and Bill no longer did, except their children. Adam had been heartbroken to see him go, but at two and a half he had readjusted pretty quickly. And Tommy was only eight months old and seemed not to know the difference. Only Bill really felt it as tears filled his eyes and ran slowly down his cheeks as the plane soared over New York and headed for California.

And once there, Bill threw himself into the show with a vengeance. He worked day and night, and sometimes even slept on the couch in his office, as the ratings continued to soar, and the show won innumerable Daytime Emmys. And in the seven years he'd been in California, Bill Thigpen had become only slightly less manic.
A Life Worth Living
had become his pride and joy, his daily companion, his best friend, his baby. He had no reason to fight it anymore. He let his work become his daily passion.

The boys came out to visit him on alternate holidays and for a month in the summer, and he loved them more than ever. But being three thousand miles away from them when he really wanted to see them every day remained extremely painful. And there had been a parade of women in his life but the only constant companion he had was the show, and the actors in it. And he lived for his vacations with Adam and Tommy. Leslie had long since married the Juilliard teacher and had two more kids, and she had finally given up teaching. With four kids at home under the age of ten, she had her hands full but she seemed to love it. She and Bill talked on the phone now and then, particularly when the boys were coming out, or if one of them was sick or if there was a problem, but they didn't have much to say to each other anymore, except about Adam and Tommy. It was hard even to remember what it had been like when they were married. The pain of losing her was gone, and the memories of the good times were dim. Except for the boys, it was all gone now. And they were the real loves in his life. In the summer, when they spent the month with him, his passion for them was even greater than anything he'd felt for the show, his attention to them more intense. He took a month's vacation every year and they usually went somewhere for part of it, and spent the rest of the time in L.A., going to Disneyland, seeing friends, just hanging out while he cooked for them and took care of them, and ached all over again when they went back to New York and left him. Adam, the older one, was almost ten now, responsible, funny, serious, and a lot like his mother. Tommy was the baby, disorganized, still a baby some of the time, even at seven, and whimsical, vague, and sometimes very, very funny. Leslie frequently told Bill that Tommy was the image of him in every way, but somehow he couldn't see it. He adored them both, and on long, lonely nights alone in L.A., his heart still ached wishing that they all lived together. It was the one thing in his life that he regretted, the one thing he couldn't change, the one thing that really depressed him at times although he tried not to let it. But the idea that he had two kids he loved and hardly ever saw seemed a high price to pay for a mistaken marriage. Why did she get to keep them and not he? Why did she get the reward for the lost years, and he get the punishment? What was fair about that? Nothing. And it only made him sure of one thing. He was never going to let it happen again. He was never going to fall madly in love, get married, have kids, and lose them. Period. No way. And over the years, he had found the perfect solution to the problem. Actresses. Hordes of them. When he had time, which wasn't often.

When he had first come to California, aching from the pain of leaving Leslie and the kids, he had fallen gratefully into the arms of a serious lady director, and had had an affair that lasted six months and almost led to disaster. She had moved in with him and taken over his life, inviting friends to stay, furnishing his apartment for him, running his life, until he felt as if he had been strangled. She had previously gone to UCLA, done graduate work at Yale, talked constantly about a Ph.D., and was into “serious film,” and she kept insisting that
A Life
was beneath him. She talked about it like a disease from which he might soon be healed, if he would only let her help him. She also hated kids, and kept putting away the photographs of his children. Remarkably, it took him a full six months to catch his breath and let her have it. It took six months because she was great in bed, treated him like a six-year-old at a time when he desperately needed nurturing and liked it, and she seemed to know everything about the television industry in L.A. But when she told him he ought to stop talking about his kids, and forget about them, he rented a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a month, gave her the key, told her to have a great time, and not to bother to call him when she found an apartment. He moved her things to the bungalow the same afternoon, and didn't run into her for the next four years until they saw each other at an awards ceremony, where she pretended not to know him.

And what had come after that had been intentionally lighthearted and easy. Actresses, starlets, walk-ons, models, girls who wanted a good time when he was free, and enjoyed going to an occasional party with him when he wasn't in a period of high stress due to some change on the show, and they wanted nothing more from him. They fitted him in among the other men in their lives, and seemed not to care when he didn't call them. Some of them cooked dinner for him occasionally, or he for them since he loved to cook, and the ones who were good with kids were sometimes called on to go to Disneyland with him when the boys were in town, but more often than not he enjoyed keeping the boys to himself during their visits to California.

More recently, Bill had gotten involved with one of the actresses on the show. Sylvia was a pretty girl from New York, and she had an important part on the show. And it was the first time in a long time that he had allowed himself the indulgence of getting involved with someone who actually worked for him. But she was a sensational-looking girl, and she had been hard to resist. She had come to the show via years as a child actress and model, the cover of
Vogue
, a year in Paris working for Lacroix, and six months in L.A. doing bit parts in an assortment of unsuccessful movies. She was a fairly decent actress, surprisingly enough, and a sweet girl, which came through on the air, and Bill was surprised himself by how much he liked her. Liked. Not loved. Love was something he reserved for Adam and Tommy, who were, respectively, nine and a half and seven. Sylvia was twenty-three, and sometimes he thought she behaved like a child herself. Along with her sweetness there was a kind of simplicity and naiveté that both touched him and amused him. Despite her worldly experiences, acting and modeling for the past nine years, she seemed to have remained relatively unsophisticated through all of it, which was at times both refreshing and annoying. She was singularly unaware of the inevitable politics that went on behind the scenes on the show, and some of her performances were superb, but she was also easy prey for the more jaded women with whom she acted. And Bill found himself constantly warning her to be more alert to the games they played and the trouble they surreptitiously tried to cause her. But childlike, she floated through all of it, and seemed to keep herself amused when Bill was too busy to entertain her, as he had been for weeks, working on the addition of two new characters, and the surprise removal of yet another. He was always careful to keep the show fresh, and keep the audiences fascinated with the never-ending plot turns.