Rent A Husband (11 page)

“I’m not your straight man, Eric. Hit me with the punch line.”

“Okay, I had zip. Bupkis, as they used to say back in the Bronx. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Westwood with an apocalyptic hangover and nostrils bleeding from a night of blow. I looked around, saw all these idiots on their laptops and it came to me: a soap about dot-commers. About internet start ups. About the loves and lives of those social misfit geeks with the truckloads of money pouring in. I went into the pitch session and I
killed
.”

“That was a great idea at the time. If you pitched it now, it’d go down like a lead balloon.”

“You’re right. It would. But I’d have another idea, one that is more
au courant.
”

“Eric, you’re brilliant, but you’re also sad and lonely and unloved.”

He looks at her stung.

“Darcy . . .”

“You live through your characters. You play God, control them, choose their victories and defeats while you stay isolated behind your superior manner and your witticisms.”

“Okay, Darce, that’s enough.”

“I love you, Eric, you’re my best friend, but I’m not one of your characters, I’m flesh-and-blood. I have to deal with everything the world throws my way and I think it’s time I stop letting you write my lines.”

Darcy walks off, eyes tearing up, about as upset as she’s been since the day Porter dumped her.

24

Stop being an idiot, Billy
, he tells himself, standing behind the cash register of the Book & Bean.

Sure, she’s not getting married.

Sure the whole proposal thing was just a stunt, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to look at a clown like you.

Not in a million years.

But as he watches Darcy walk out of the coffee shop with Eric Royce, Poor Billy Bigelow can’t help it.

He feels little tendrils of absurd hope unfurling in him, and as he takes cash from Brontë and makes change, he can’t stop himself whistling a happy tune.

Brontë sees how William looks at the woman named after a high-calorie snack.

She knows what that look means, even though a man has never looked at her that way.

She’s seen it in the eyes of couples mooning over one another in restaurants, on buses, on the beach.

They seem to be everywhere, these love-sick people.

And here’s another one.

The man she’s feeling all soft and gooey over.

Just her luck.

Brontë hides her disappointment, finishes her shift and helps William to tidy up and lock the store at six p.m.

“What are your plans, tonight, William?”

“Oh, I have a thing I need to do.”

“Like a date?”

He laughs. “No, no. Just a . . . thing.”

It’s something to do with that woman
, she tells herself.

Something to do with that Darcy Pringle.

William locks the front door.

“Okay, you have a good night now.”

“You too, William.”

Brontë watches as he walks down the sidewalk, disappearing around a corner.

And, when she heads in the same direction, Brontë tells herself that she’s not following him.

Never.

She’s just out for a stroll, getting to know the town.

William, in his own world, shambles along.

He has a nasty altercation with a trash can.

He bumps his head on the low-hanging branch of a tree.

When he crosses to the opposite sidewalk he trips on the curb and only a desperate lurch and spin stops him from falling.

He is, without a doubt, the clumsiest man Brontë has ever met.

And the most adorable.

When she sees him enter the Senior Center she tells herself that decency demands that she turn around and go home.

But curiosity, that old cat killer, has her in its grip, drawing her into the garden.

She hears music, something very old and scratchy.

Strings and horns and a high croony voice waft out into the night, and the music draws her toward a picture window.

Hiding in the shrubbery, Brontë peers through the window and sees the most incredible sight.

A gaggle of old ladies, bent and wrinkled, some tiny as children, mob huge, bumbling, William Bigelow.

He takes one of them by her birdlike arm and leads her onto the dance floor.

Oh God
, Brontë thinks,
I can’t watch this
.

Is this some strange method of euthanasia, turning this massive clumsy man loose on these tiny, fragile women?

But then William takes the old woman’s hand in his, places his fingers on her spine and moves her around the dance floor in the lightest and most graceful of waltzes.

Brontë blinks, convinced she’s dreaming.

But when she opens her eyes and sees the big man twirl the old lady and sweep her into his arms, the woman smiling in delight, Brontë realizes that it’s official: she’s in love with William Bigelow.

25

Eric Royce sits on his porch in the dark, his demons dancing around him in the shadows.

Darcy’s words stung, and he feels as empty, shallow and unloved as she said he was.

How easy it would be to hit speed-dial on his phone and summon a dealer from down in Ventura.

In forty minutes a car would draw up outside his house and a man in a bad suit, gripping an attaché case filled with chemicals, would oil up his pathway and the last few years of living clean would be gone.

Poof.

Eric takes his phone from his pocket, but when he dials a number it’s not his dealer he’s calling.

“Forrest,” he says when a voice answers, “how are you?”

“I’m good, Eric. I returned the car as promised.”

“Of course you did, that’s not why I’m calling.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a situation.”

“A situation?”

“Yes. That stunt of yours has had repercussions, I’m afraid.”

“Oh? You’re not telling me I have to go through with the wedding are you?” Forrest says, laughing. “I mean, come on, it was all in the way of fun.”

“Yes, and fun it was. No, it’s about Darcy.”

“What about her?”

“She’s low, Forrest.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but what can I do?”

“Call her up. Ask her out.”

“She loathes me.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Eric, she’s a nice woman. She doesn’t need a guy like me in her life.”

“Oh,
au contraire
, I think you’re exactly what she needs. She’s lived amongst philistines for far too long. Show her that there’s more to life than the low horizon of this bloody town.”

“I thought you loved it up there?”

“I do, but only because I’m jaded, Forrest. I’ve seen it all. Darcy has seen nothing, and I want you to give her a glimpse of the big, wide world out there.”

“How?”

“Talk to her. Tell her things. Tell her about India, about Africa. Intrigue her, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t think so, Eric.”

“I’ll make it worth your while.”

“How?”

“I’m putting together a pilot, for a reality show.”

“Hell, that’s really scraping the barrel.”

“I could say something about glass houses and stones, old son, but I won’t.”

“Okay, I’m sorry.”

“I’d like you to audition for presenter.”

“Me? When I tried-out for
Startup
you told me that my wooden performance lived up to my name.”

“Maybe I got a little carried away by my own cleverness.”

“Maybe.”

“Forrest, I’m sincere. I’ll have my people line up an audition. I saw something in you at the Ball last night that caught my interest. But I need you to help me with Darcy.”

“Okay, I’ll ask her out, even though she’ll probably turn me down.”

“I suspect she won’t. But one thing, Forrest, she’s never to know that we spoke, understood?”

“Sure.”

Eric ends the call and feels not the slightest twinge of guilt.

He can master his addiction to chemicals, but nobody—not even his dearest friend and neighbor Darcy Pringle—is going to stop him from playing God.

26

Wearing her darkest dark glasses, Darcy reverses the SUV (a clunky relic of the
Porter-era
as she now finds herself calling the twelve years of her marriage) out of the garage and turns it toward town.

This is the first time she’s left the house since her coffee date with Eric at the Book & Bean three days ago.

She’s been lying low.

Ben and Jerry have been her
BFFs and she’s watched enough ten-tissue weepies—
Nicholas Sparks should be tried for crimes against the female heart!
—to turn her brain to mush along with her midriff.

 She doesn’t look at Eric’s house as she passes, and if a lace curtain twitches at Carlotta McCourt’s lair she doesn’t allow herself to see it.

Darcy drives down the main road, fights off the temptation to dash into the Book & Bean for a caramel iced mocha and a cream Danish to go, and heads for the hills.

The quaintness of Santa Sofia dribbles away into the brush as Darcy crosses a ridge and winds down to the town of Bascomb.

Once the center of a minor oil boom, Bascomb was flooded with money a hundred years ago—people living high-on-the-hog as her absconded dad (a wildcatter in his youth) may have said—but is a sad and depleted place now, with rusted oil rigs littering the horizon and storefronts in the main road boarded up.

The place depresses her deeply and if she didn’t have a mission to accomplish here, she would turn the fat-rumped SUV around and head home
to continue her career as a miserable shut-in.

But she drives on and parks outside a freshly painted building with a small yard filled with flowers, an oasis in the midst of the grim surroundings.

Darcy checks her face in the mirror and judges her appearance adequate to the task at hand, and as she steps down from the high vehicle, she even manages to find something resembling a smile.

The smile becomes real, and the sadness and humiliation of the last days is forgotten, when kids spill from the entrance of the building and mob Darcy, resisting the attempts of their harried minders to contain them.

If they think of pretty, nicely-put together Darcy Pringle as their fairy princess, what harm can it do?

Darcy visits once a month, always with gifts and provisions and she knows most of the children by name.

Had even chosen—one of the most difficult choices she’d ever had to make—a beautiful freckled five-year-old, Sam, as the child she and Porter would adopt.

Before.

Before.

Before . . .

Darcy on her knees talking to Sam, feels the prick of tears.

God, girl, I thought Mr. Sparks had you all wrung out.

She’s saved when one of the saintly women who run the center appears in the playground with a giant check: the proceeds from the Spring Ball.

The check, of course, is purely symbolic, prepared for a photo-op with the
Bascomb Bugle
.

The money raised a few nights ago has already made its electronic way into the Children’s Center’s bank account.

Darcy stands and the kids crowd around her as she holds one side of the check, the editor-cum-journalist-cum-photographer of
The Bugle
hurrying up, looking as harried as ever, his combed-over hair flapping in the slight breeze in the open playground.

He looks around and says, “Your husband on his way?”

One of the women makes frantic signals, tapping her own ring finger—indicating Darcy’s empty one (Forrest Forbes’s ring is back home in her safe) but the man doesn’t get it, staring in confusion.

“Mr. Pringle and I are no longer married,” Darcy says, with as much composure as she can muster. “So I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with just me today.”

“Of course, I see. I’m sorry, I had no idea,” the man mumbles, fussing with his camera.

The photograph is taken and Darcy spends a little more time with the kids, her broken heart broken all over again (
is that even possible, Darcy?
) when she has to say goodbye, watching Sam—always the last to go inside—waving at her through the fence.

As she drives home, the afternoon sun silhouetting the rusted old rigs, she feels a sadness so profound that when her phone (left untouched in her purse these last days) rings she draws it out, expecting it to be Eric, begging to be recalled from purgatory.

But it’s not Eric.

CALLER UNKNOWN
is displayed on the face of her BlackBerry, and she almost ignores it, thinking it’ll be a phone marketer trying to unload something useless on her.

But she answers and hears a voice saying, “Hi, Darcy, this is Forrest. Forrest Forbes.”

27

Forrest has found the last few days strangely liberating.

What was it that great 20
^th
century philosopher Kris Kristofferson once said about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose?

With his winnings—Mr. Darcy has his eternal gratitude—Forrest was able to square the debt with Raymond Gomez.

The bookmaker had seemed almost disappointed when they met at a juice bar in Westwood.

“I thought I was going to have a bit more fun with you, Forrest.”

“Sorry to deprive you, Ray.”

Raymond shrugged. “So, what do you fancy today?”

Forrest shook his head. “I’m swearing off the gambling, Raymond. I’ve learned my lesson.”

The bookmaker laughed. “You know how many times I hear that on any given day, my friend?”