Til the Real Thing Comes Along (46 page)

“Let’s get her home,” he said, gesturing to Rifke, who sat on a bench under a tree a few yards away. R.J. was alarmed. She
didn’t like the look on Alvin’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just a headache,” he said.

R.J. hurried to her mother. “Ma,” she said. “You okay?”

Rifke was smoking a cigarette.

“Yeahsure,” Rifke said, as if it were one word. “I got a nerve pressing.”

R.J. would have thought it beyond the call of duty for Cousin Maxie, whom she didn’t even remember, to pick her up at the
airport, if she didn’t know that it was because Uncle Shulke had called in some chit from the past to get him to do it.

“How is that son of a bitch?” Maxie, who was open-shirted, fuzzy-chested, and sweaty, asked as he threw R.J.’s bags into the
back of his station wagon. He got into the driver’s seat, moved a baby car-seat out of the passenger seat into the back, and
leaned over to pull up the door-lock button so R.J. could get in.

“The same,” she answered as she slid onto the hot plastic seat. There were six or seven McDonald’s wrappers on the floor by
her feet.

“Yeah, I’m sure, the lousy
gonif,”
Maxie said. “You know what a
gonif
is?”

“Yes,” R.J. told him as he pulled away from the curb, looking at her instead of into his rearview mirror. They were almost
hit by a bus.

“You
shvartze
jungle bunny,” Maxie yelled—at the driver of the bus, R.J. assumed. Now they were safely in the lane that was moving out
of the airport.

“Yeah, Shulke always hated your father, and you know why? Because your father was a Commie. He believed people should pull
for one another. Shulke, if ft was a few
years ago in the South, woulda been a slave owner. And he made your mother work very hard all those years. For no money. Everyone
in the family knew what a
momzer
he was. A no-goodnik. You’re too young to remember how he treated Bubbe.”

“I remember, all right,” R.J. said, watching the Los Angeles landscape go by. This was the farthest she’d ever been from home.
The West Coast. She’d survived her first airplane flight Look at that. Those were oil wells. Right in the middle of the city.
Oil wells.

“Shulke never wanted his own mother to live in his house. So that
feygele
son of his, Barry, sees Bubbe’s teeth in the glass and gets so scared that Bubbe has to move out.”

“And move in with my parents,” R.J. said.

“That’s right. Your mother, who is an absolute angel, takes in Bubbe, and still Shulke charges her rent. The bastard.” Maxie
was quiet for a while. Then he spoke up again in a voice so loud it was as if he thought R.J. were in another car instead
of a foot away from him. “So you’re comin’ here from Pittsburgh to do what? To be in show business, don’t make me laugh. I
know all about show business because I’m in the coffee business so I service a lot of the networks and studios. Let me tell
you something. You know how many girls get off the bus, the train, the plane every day who are a hell of a lot prettier than
you are and want to be actresses just like you do? And I don’t know about you, but those girls? They’ll do anything to get
a job and—”

“I want to be a writer,” R.J. said quietly. Maxie’s car radio was on with the volume turned very low. The Beatles were singing
“Michelle.”

“What kind of writer?”

“Comedy mostly.”

“No chance. They don’t let girls be comedy writers. It’s always guys. A buncha guys. Like on
Your Show of Shows.
Ever watch
Show of Shows?
All guys wrote that show. Red Skelton? All guys.”

“Are we far from the hotel?” R.J. asked.

“Ten minutes.” For the rest of the ride, neither he nor R.J. said anything. In fact, Maxie didn’t say a word until he had
given her bags and hair dryer to the bellman at the apartment hotel where he was dropping her, and was about to get back into
the car.

“By the way, the station wagon here is my wife’s car. I drive a Mercedes. Next time you talk to your Uncle Shulke, tell him
that. You can also tell him that last year, Kaminsky Coffee grossed a million five.” And he got into the station wagon.

“Thanks for the ride,” R.J. said, but she suspected he didn’t hear her.

After the bellman left, R.J. stood in the middle of her hotel room and looked at the one big and one small suitcase, and the
green plastic dome-shaped hair dryer. Everything she owned in the world. This room with a kitchenette was cozy, bigger than
any she’d ever stayed in before, except maybe the one she’d shared with France the time Frande’s parents took them to New
York.

Los Angeles. She was in Los Angeles. Alone. From her window she could see the swimming pool below. There were four or five
people lying oiled on lounge chairs, and three of them had telephones next to them. The telephones were on long cords that
were pulled out the open doors of what must be the people’s respective apartments. It looked as though they were all expecting
important phone calls.

She would unpack and start making her own important calls.

She arrived on Wednesday, and before the weekend she had meetings set up for every day of the following week with Evie Bingham’s
contacts, and she had made friends with two of the people in her building. One was Dinah Goldsmith, a bleached-blond, curly-haired
casting director from New York who was casting a movie in Los Angeles, and hoped to move west permanently. The other was Arthur
Misner.

R.J. wasn’t sure what he did exactly, but it was something in the music business called A and R. He was one of the people
she’d seen with the telephone on the long cord pulled outside. He had very curly brown hair and green eyes and a toothy smile
and he was funny, but in a kind of shy way. Not obvious or loud. He told R.J. he had a girlfriend in Detroit who would probably
be coming out soon to live in Los Angeles. She told him she had a boyfriend back in Pittsburgh, and that within a matter of
weeks she’d be going back to marry him.

By the end of the third week she knew she’d never felt closer to any male in her life than she did to Arthur Misner.
At the end of each afternoon she would rush home from her meetings with the producers and script supervisors and bombard him
with stories about her day. The one with the comedy writing team of Bernie Weinberg and Arnie Brenowitz. Bernie, the tall
one, had gone to Carnegie Tech. Arnie, the short one, sat at a desk across from Bernie’s desk. He ate sunflower seeds and
then spit the shells a few feet away into a wastebasket.

“So Evie sent you?” Bernie asked with a big grin. “Evie was my teacher, what was it… fifteen years ago? I don’t know why she
thinks I have jobs here for writers. She doesn’t get that
we’re
the writers here and we don’t need any other writers. Besides, you want to have a life like this? Some nights we’re here
past midnight. Be smart. You’re a fairly attractive person. Meet a guy, preferably out of the business, and marry his ass,
honey. Don’t kid yourself. There’s no glamour here. See this office? What’s missing? How about a window? Writers don’t get
windows. We get
gornisht.
You understand
gornisht?”

She nodded. She wanted to be able to say something funny but she couldn’t think of a thing, she told Arthur later.

“Oy,
she’s going to cry,” Bernie said. Arnie crunched another sunflower seed.

“No,” R.J. said. “I… I…” She wished he hadn’t said she was going to cry because that made her feel like crying and…

“Sweetheart,” Bernie said, and now he walked over and reached a hand into Arnie’s sunflower seeds, stuck one in his mouth,
and sucked on it while he talked. “You want to be a writer? Write. Pick a show you like. It doesn’t have to be
our
show. It can be
Beverly Hillbillies.
It can be
Gilligaris Island, I Dream of Jeannie,
but sit down and try to write one. Then show it around.” His teeth crunched down on the shell; then he chewed and swallowed
the whole thing. “Then get back to us.”

Speculative scripts. In essence, that’s what everyone told her she should write. Pick one television show you love. Watch
it again and again. Get to know the characters; then write an episode and use it as a writing sample. Take a month or two
and then get back to them. Yes, her play was fine. Nicely done. Showed great promise. Write a spec script.

Then there was Karl Berman, the froggy-looking producer
friend of Evie’s who had met R.J. at the door of his house dressed in a bathrobe with yellowy egg stains on the lapel.

“I’m
looking
for a young writer,” he said, putting his big fat feet up on the coffee table. “I got a movie project that’s about high school
kids and every writer I know is too jaded to handle it. I already have a deal to do it at Columbia.”

A black Doberman pinscher was outside, pawing at the glass door from the pool.

“I’ve been having a real hard time finding anybody. What do you think?”

A job. To write a movie. She didn’t even know how to write a movie.

“I think it sounds interesting” was all she could think of to say.

“I mean, if Evie likes you—shit, she was a bridesmaid in my wedding to my… let’s see… third wife? No. Second. I love Evie.
You know?”

R.J. nodded. She couldn’t wait to tell Arthur the part about Karl Berman not knowing if Evie was a friend of his second or
third wife.

“Want to try to take a pass at it?”

“Sure,” R.J. had said, not believing that here she was, making a deal to write a movie, and how quickly she was conquering
Hollywood.

“Tonight after dinner we’ll talk more about it,” he said, and now he was leering. No.

“I have plans for dinner,” she said.

“Break ’em,” he ordered.

“I can’t.” She stood.

“No dinner, no job,” he announced, standing. His robe was opening.

“Fine,” she said. And, queasy, she headed quickly for what she hoped she remembered correctly was the front door, because
if it wasn’t, she’d run into the Doberman. The last words she heard were “What did you think? I was gonna just give you a
job? Are you crazy? Do you know who I am?”

The most recent meeting had taken place at a hot-dog stand, where the story editor insisted she have a chili dog with him.
While he was telling her his own success story, she’d had to run to the gas station next door and be sick.

Arthur laughed at all of them, and in turn he told her
about all the Hollywood characters he met up with in a day. Eventually, Dinah would join them, and dinner would be take-out
for the three of them by the pool.

“Maybe it would be good,” Dinah said knowingly one night, as she scraped the sweet-and-sour sauce from a piece of sweet-and-sour
chicken because she was on a diet, “if we introduced the girlfriend in Detroit to the doctor boyfriend in Pittsburgh, because
that way we could save her a ticket out here and you a ticket home, and everyone would live happily ever after.”

Neither R.J. nor Arthur looked up from the food on their plates. “Or maybe I should keep my big mouth shut.”

“Maybe,” Arthur said shyly, “the three of us should drive down to Palm Springs this weekend. I can get a room, and you two
girls can share one cheaply, and R.J. would probably love to see Palm Springs. It’s a lot like Pittsburgh.”

“Ma,” R.J. said into the phone that night. She called Rifke three times a week. “How’s by you?”

“Huh?” Rifke said, then added:
“Oy,
I took off my glasses so I can’t hear. Wait a second. Is it you, Rosele? Now I got ’em on.”

“Yeah, Ma. How do you feel?”

“Me? The same. Tonight I worked in the store, I had a sandwich and some soup at Polonsky’s with Mort Silverberg, I watched
Bill Burns, now I’m watching Johnny. What about you?”

“I’m fine. I’ll be home in about ten days.”

“My son-in-law the doctor came by today,” Rifke said, and R.J. felt a heavy feeling. Guilty and sad. “Does he call you?”

“A lot,” R.J. said.

“Good,” Rifke said, reassured.

“I miss you, Ma.”

“Meyn kleine meydele,”
Rifke said, sounding so much like Bubbe that R.J.’s eyes filled with tears.
“Du bist meyn velt.
” You are my world.

After they hung up, R.J. remembered that she’d forgotten to tell Rifke that she was leaving on Friday for Palm Springs and
wouldn’t be back until Monday morning. It didn’t matter. She would call her mother from there.

Their first dinner in Palm Springs was at Bob’s Big Boy, which Arthur called
Robaire’s.
Their second was at Denny’s, which he called
Chez Denis.
The three of them got too
burned at the pool of the Motel Six, and stayed up talking until dawn all three nights about everything any of them had ever
felt. Dinah read R.J.’s play and said it was like Broadway. Arthur said he loved it and added, “If Neil Simon knew you were
lurking out here, he would be a wreck.”

When they were packing to leave Palm Springs, Dinah asked her: “How can you be so crazy about Arthur and go back to some guy
who sounds from your description like a big-headed shmuck doctor who’s going to stifle you for the rest of your life?”

R.J. didn’t know what to answer.

“I have to get back to Pittsburgh. I miss my mother, and she really needs me. I’ll send all the producers my speculative scripts
from there, as soon as I’ve written them, and then…”

“And then, what?”

“We’ll see.”

The desk at the apartment hotel was very busy when they got back. People were checking in and out, so R.J. didn’t stop for
messages. But when she got to her room the red light on her telephone was blinking, so before she even opened her overnight
bag she dialed the message operator. The phone rang for a long time, and finally he picked up.

“Oh. You’ve had a lot of calls,” he said.

“From?” she asked.

“Let’s see. One from Maxie…”

“My cousin.” What could he have possibly wanted? Maybe he felt bad about the way he’d acted the day she arrived. Or maybe
he knew she’d be leaving in a week or so, and Shulke’s deal with him included his taking her back to the airport as well.