Show Business Kills (10 page)

“Hey,” he said, smiling his most adorable Billy smile. It was one of a repertoire of smiles Marly knew so well that one night,
when they were still wildly in love, she’d described them and named them for him, and he’d laughed in her arms about how well
she knew him. This was one she
called, “Howdy, Ma’am.” It had a degree of reticence, a politesse, and a humility Billy didn’t possess anywhere in his actual
emotional makeup, only as an arrow in his performer’s quiver.

“I have all the encyclopedias I need,” Marly said, and he grinned.

“I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d stop by and remind you that tonight’s the first taping of my new show, so I’ll
be sending a car and driver to get the twins at around five-thirty, and if I could have them for two nights, I’d like to take
them to Disneyland—“

“But your secretary and your publicist and your manager were all too busy to call and ask me those questions, the way they
usually do?” she asked. He laughed at that, but it was an embarrassed laugh.

“Look, Mar, I’ve been a jerk. I know that. I made a mess out of our lives together and don’t think I don’t know it was all
my fault. But I’ve been thinking all week about coming over to ask you if you thought that there was ever a way that we could
all get back together and be a family again.”

Marly stared at him, sure this had to be a dream. That any minute the phone would ring or the alarm would go off and wake
her. This was not Billy Mann, TV star, her soon to be ex-husband, doing the impossible. Think carefully, her shrink told her,
before you say anything to him. Don’t let him get to you. So she took a long pause, and finally spoke.

“Billy.” She felt herself trying not to tremble. “In my lifetime, I’ve seen a lot of things. Men walking on the moon, and
the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War. I even saw the nutrition pyramid change so that carbohydrates are
now better for me than protein, something I always
wished would happen. So I know there are miracles in this world, and good ones, too. But I still don’t believe that one of
those could possibly be that you’d want to have a family experience. So what do you really want?”

In spite of her words she was drowning in hope. Being pulled down by the inexplicable possibility that the impossible had
happened. But at the same time knowing it was absurd, childish, to believe it. No, a better word would be lunacy.

“Yes, but Mar, you’re the one who always says you’re invested in the idea that the human spirit has the capacity for change.
And I know if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be working so hard with that shrink of yours, or signing up for all the self-help
workshops you go to, or reading all the books about Eastern philosophies.”

“True, but I’m the one who’s doing all of that, not you, which means you’re not the one who’s changing. So no, I don’t think
we have a chance. At least not now. You’d need to do a lot of work on yourself before I could ever go back.” When the words
were out of her mouth, she said a little prayer that he’d give her an argument.

“What if I start doing the work? Did a crash course, like the Stanley Kaplan’s, for becoming a good guy?”

“What if you did?”

“Would you give us a shot?”

She was choking on the words, yes, I love you, but what she said was, “I have to think about it.”

“Can I come in while you do?”

She sighed and stepped back into the foyer, and he followed her, taking in the hall and then the high-ceilinged living room
that she’d redone three times since he’d left, just to
keep busy. “The house looks great,” he said appreciatively. He’d never once said that when he lived there.

“Thanks.”

“
You
look great,” he said, looking at her body in the white Fernando Sanchez robe.

“Billy, what do you want? What is it? This is such a stunning overnight change, you’ll forgive me if I suspect it.”

He was wandering ahead of her to the kitchen and she followed him on the cold marble floor, in her bare feet, having a sudden
rush of worry that she hadn’t had a pedicure in a month and that maybe her toenails looked bad.

“I don’t know. Mid-life crisis, maybe. Looking at my life, sitting at that desk every night interviewing all those women,
like tonight my guests are that pig Madonna and that moron Kim Basinger, and I know I’ll be thinking ‘Yeah? So what?’ They
wear too much makeup, they push too hard, they need writers to make them funny, and you don’t.”

In a sudden move, he hoisted himself up to sit on the center chopping-block island, which was where he always used to sit
when he lived there, just where he used to like to sit on those delicious nights when after sex they’d come down to the kitchen
to have a pot of tea. It felt so nostalgic to Marly that she hurried to the stove, turned on the kettle, and looked in the
brisker to see if there were any cookies.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I still can’t do it.”

Please, she prayed, whirling around, don’t let him change his mind. “But I think I’ve grown up,” he went on, staring out the
window. “I think I finally get it. So what can I say? When I look back on my life, the only times I remember ever really being
happy were the times I was in the house with you and the twins. I know we weren’t always in sync.”

Marly couldn’t control a snicker.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, “you can laugh. You should laugh. We both know I was a dog. But I need to change. I want to be
good for my family. And I think I can.”

Marly stood completely still in the spot, afraid that her moving might make him reconsider again. “And did I mention that
I really love you?” he asked. Oh, God. He hadn’t said those words to her in years. She took two cups and saucers out of a
cupboard and hoped he didn’t hear them clinking together because she was trembling as she put them on the counter.

“Actually you didn’t mention that,” she said.

He sighed and looked long at her with very big, sad eyes. “Well, I really really do,” he said and he put out a hand for her
to come and take, which she did. And as he studied her hand that still had a white circle around the third finger from her
recently removed wedding band, he said, “We both know I don’t deserve it, but if you take me back, I swear you won’t be sorry.”
Then he kissed each of her fingers.

“Don’t do that, Billy,” she said with zero conviction in her voice. She’d been celibate since he left. He took each of her
arms in his hands and put them around his waist, then looked into her eyes. Sitting on the counter made his head higher than
hers, which was probably the reason he did it.

“I love you, Mar,” he said mow, putting his hands in her white curly hair that had been piled on top of her head in the bathtub
and was coming down, as a bobby pin found its way down her neck and into the back of the robe. She closed her eyes, knowing
he would kiss her, praying he would kiss her.

Please don’t let me ever wake up, she thought as his lips touched hers softly, then harder, and then he slid down from
the counter and put his feet on the floor, while her silky white robe seemed to fall open without any help at all. And on
the kitchen banquette, at ten-thirty in the morning, Marly Bennet was making hot, wet love with her almost ex-husband, and
both of them were crying while the tea kettle whistle shrieked.

“I love you, I’ll always love you, I’m so afraid.” Marly wasn’t sure later which of them said which of those words, or if
both of them said them all. Afterward, they had tea and cookies, and when Billy stood at the door, he reminded her about the
car and driver coming to pick up the twins at five-thirty to take them to his taping, and he said he’d call her tomorrow to
find out what she thought of the show.

“A pain reliever,” she said on the way back upstairs. That was the product in the commercial she was auditioning for today.
Some pain reliever, though her agent, Harry, told her when he called that he wasn’t sure which pain reliever. Usually she
had more information to go on—what the character in the commercial was like, what income stratum, what lifestyle, so she’d
know how to dress.

“Well, no pain relievers for this girl today,” she said out loud, laughing a happy laugh.

  
8
  

B
efore she realized that a successful career could turn a relationship into a ménage à trois, with the career as the third
being, Marly was happy. Her career had been moving along nicely before she met Billy, but she tried hard not to let the success
get to her equanimity. She would not let her ego get inflated like the balloons in the Macy’s parade the way she’d seen it
happen to so many actors. So far she’d avoided having the obligatory entourage of managers, publicists, personal trainers,
and masseuses.

When she and Billy met at the Improv, she’d been on “The Corner Bar,” her first TV situation comedy, for two years, and her
style as a gifted comedienne was already well respected. She had a healthy salary, loved the work, and was very hopeful about
her future. And she knew she was doing something right when she was introduced at the tapings and ran out to take her bow
and the studio audience went wild cheering for her.

She remembered reading an article about one of her favorite actors, James Cagney, who was quoted as describing his career
as “just a job,” something he did well but into which he didn’t invest his soul. Marly was determined to treat hers that way,
too.

“Way bigger bucks,” Billy said to her one night in the car as he drove her home from the taping. He came to nearly every Friday
night shoot, because Friday nights at the Comedy Store and the Improv were the night when the polished, well-known stand-up
comics got up to work. Low-on-the-totem-pole guys like Billy Mann were relegated to working during the week. At Marly’s tapings
he sat in a seat the network pages also roped off for him in the front row, and he cheered the loudest for Marly when she
came out for her bow.

“Your character is breaking out. They should spin her off,” he said to her in that inside lingo that bothered Marly when he
used it.

“Thank you, honey,” she said, sitting back with her eyes closed against the passenger seat of Billy’s old Datsun with the
ripped upholstery. She was pleased with the way the taping had gone that night.

“I think you hire a PR guy tomorrow and start a campaign to get them to give you your own show.”

She laughed.

“I mean it.”

She should have known then, and maybe she really did in her solar plexus, that Billy’s ambition would be what brought them
down.

“It’s okay, Bill,” she said. “I’ll get there in time.”

“Not if you don’t step on people’s necks you won’t.”

She remembered how he pulled his hand away from hers that night when she patted his hand to calm him down. “You have to ride
the wave,” he warned. “You only get so many of them. This is yours. Don’t just let it move you around. Get on top of it.”

She didn’t feel his brand of desperation, his hunger. She had grown up in a world of abundance, with a handsome doctor father,
an elegant picture-book mother, in a home and a town in New England out of Currier and Ives. Billy was a poor kid from a big
Catholic family in which he had to be funny to get attention. And now, even though he was a history-making late-night star,
no amount of attention ever seemed to be enough for him.

So when he started making it on television, he went hog wild. Not just for himself and his career, but for Marly and the twins
Marly had carried after “The Corner Bar” went off the air. Billy was a hit stand-up comic guesting on other people’s shows
and making Johnny Carson laugh so hard the star had to put his face down on the desk. And after a while he was making very
big money as a headliner in Las Vegas.

He spent every dime, on a new house, new cars, overly lavish birthday parties, trips in private planes, and on a staff of
so many people that one day Marly found herself coming home from taking the girls to the park and asking some strange woman
in a uniform in her kitchen, “Who in the hell are you?”

The woman was the special nutritionist bringing bodybuilding meals for Mr. Mann. Too much, it had all been too much. Especially
after Billy got his own show, when things started moving out of the realm of the real world. It wasn’t the same as being an
actor on a sit-com whom people stopped on the street and squinted at and asked, “Aren’t you, uh… on that show… what’s it called
again?” This was different. This was about walking into every restaurant and watching people sit up and crane their necks,
and about hearing
the constant hum of his name, Billy Mann, Billy Mann, look, Billy Mann.