Til the Real Thing Comes Along (51 page)

“Wow,” Arthur said, walking out to the curb at American Airlines where they always picked him up, and putting his arms around
both R.J. and Jeffie, who stood waiting. “Look at my glamorous wife and my handsome kid.” He got into the driver’s seat while
R.J. put Jeffie into the back, then slid into the passenger seat. “What’s happening, you two?” he asked. Still R.J. didn’t
tell him. She would wait until he’d had a chance to relax and they were at dinner.

He was quiet the entire time, except to say that the sauce was a little too spicy. Finally, with dessert—fresh berries and
cream—she told him. About the call from Harvey Lembeck, about how nervous she’d been at the interview at first, but then began
to roll once she could tell that the producer really liked her material.

Arthur’s eyes danced with pride when she told him how Harvey Lembeck’s agent had offered to make the deal for her. Negotiate.
And how much money he had managed to get her per week. All of this handled on her own. Not to mention how she’d hired the
housekeeper, Manuela, who seemed really eager to have the job and who would start a week from now, to get oriented before
R.J. started work.

“My wife,” Arthur said grinning. There was a television commercial for some vitamin, maybe it was Geritol, where the husband
listed alt the things his wife accomplished in a day, then looked at the wife with pride and said the part that Arthur was
about to say now. It was a little joke he and R.J. had. “I think I’ll keep her.”

“Now here’s the part I’m not real sure about,” she said, poking her spoon into a strawberry to cut it in half. “Two of the
weeks are in Philadelphia, so shall I take Manuela and Jeffie with me, or shall I fly back on the weekends to be with him?
I can do it either way, but I think taking him would probably be the best thing for him because…” She spooned the strawberry
into her mouth and bit into it,
tasting the tart red juice as it filled her mouth. Then she looked at Arthur’s face. The pride was gone from his eyes and
she wasn’t sure what was replacing it. Fear? Anger?

“No.” he said.

“Huh?”

“You’re going to have to tell them you can’t take the job.”

Oh, a joke. R.J. smiled. He had to be kidding.

“Right.” she said.

“I don’t mind you working, but not out of town. I don’t want my son staying in some hotel in Philadelphia. I want him here
and you here when I get home.” Not kidding.

“Arthur.” R.J. said. This was impossible. This wasn’t Arthur. “You can’t be serious. You travel all over the country every
week in service of your work. I’m talking about two tiny weeks. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I want you to call them tomorrow and tell them you’ll be glad to work on the show here in Los Angeles, but you have a small
child and you can’t go to Philadelphia. If they want you on those terms… fine.”

“Arthur, I won’t do that. I’m going to take the job, and go to Philadelphia too.”

He was quiet. She looked down at her strawberries. Finally he spoke, in a voice that didn’t even sound familiar. Didn’t sound
as if it came from him. Her husband. The man she thought she knew.

“This marriage won’t survive it.”

She didn’t believe that. It was an empty threat. This wasn’t something that destroyed a marriage. Where two people loved each
other. Had everything going. Had a child they both adored. He was testing her. Without looking at him she got up from the
table and took her dirty dishes to the kitchen. As she was putting them into the sink, she heard him say in that same voice,
“I mean it.”

Neither of them said another word that whole night. She bathed; he stared at the television. She did a crossword puzzle; he
showered. He read; she turned off her light. He turned off his light; she got out of bed, went into the living room, and read
the magazines she’d bought nearly a month before.

In the morning Jeffie’s cries awakened her and she realized she’d slept on the sofa all night. Arthur had left for work. She
dressed Jeffie, made him breakfast, took him for
a long walk, washed the breakfast dishes, cleaned her room, did some laundry, and gave Jeffie lunch. At two-thirty, when she
figured executives were back in their offices after lunch, she gave Jeffie a big stack of blocks to play with and called Bill
Lee. While she waited for him to pick up the phone and take her call, she felt queasy. When he got on the telephone she told
him that she couldn’t go to Philadelphia, hoping he would say she could work on the show for the other five weeks.

He was sweet, but he sounded very busy, with the telephone ringing a lot in the background, and twice he apologized for having
to put her on hold while he took other calls. But when he finally got back on the phone he said he was sorry and that one
of these days he would use her on some other show. And then he had to rush off to go into a meeting.

Jeffie had fallen asleep, so R.J. went outside and sat at the pool for a long time, listening to the pool sweeper clicking
and swooshing as it made its way around, sucking the algae from the tile.

The phone had probably rung six or seven times before she actually heard it, and when she did she got up and walked slowly
toward the house, as if she were hoping the ringing would stop before she got there so she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone.
She picked it up in the kitchen.

“‘Lo?” she said softly.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice said.

“Yes.”

“R.J. Misner?”

“Yes.”

“This is Reva Weingarten.”

R.J. had no idea who that was.

“I’m calling because I’m trying to get some kind of head count for this Thursday. Do you know if you’ll be coming to the C.R.
meeting?”

Jeffie was waking. She could hear him calling her from the living room. The front doorbell rang. It was probably the plumber.
She had called him this morning to come and look at the drain in the kitchen sink that was on the fritz. At least now she’d
be able to do the lunch dishes that were sitting in a messy pile on the counter.

“Yes,” R.J. said into the telephone. “I’ll be there.”

1977

A
s David Malcolm made a hard right and pulled his navy Jaguar sedan up the driveway toward the stately old house on Bellagio
Road, the two women seated in the back of the car said, “Oh yes.” in unison. The women were Babs, David’s wife of two months,
and Helen, his sister-in-law of same.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Daphy Woods, who was sitting in the front passenger seat so she would be more easily able to direct
David to all the houses they were seeing that day. Daphy was a close friend’s wife and had been a residential real estate
broker for ten days. It was a career she’d decided on in order to keep herself from, as she put it, “going absitively bonkers”
now that all the kids were in school. “But the inside is even more divine,” she said. “With a kitchen that was in the Homes
section of the
Times,
and when the Copeleys lived here it was in
Architectural Digest.
“

David helped the ladies out of the car, and for a long moment even Daphy was quiet as they all stood looking at the house.
Then, with Daphy in the lead, key in hand, they made their way across the lawn to the house. This is a mistake, David thought,
and when Daphy, who stepped aside to let the clients enter the house first, as she’d been taught, turned back after she’d
opened the door and saw the look on his face, she laughed nervously.

“Oh, c’mon, David,” she said. “This is just for fun, you duck. I
know
you liked the one on Mandeville, but this one is my newest listing and I have to show it off.”

Daphne Waverly Woods was a piece of work. She’d been married to David’s dose college friend Charlie since their freshman year
in college. She talked endlessly, called everyone a duck, and admitted that all she knew about real estate was how to get
from one house to the next. But when it came to the math and the money, she admittedly would rush home to Charlie and have
him do all the paperwork for her. David and Babs were using Daphy as a broker for the same reason that the Marsdens were listing
their Trousdale estate with her, and the Perrys had listed this big old born, because she was Charlie’s lovable wife.

Babs and her sister were already in the kitchen. David could hear their voices echoing back to the entry hall of the huge
empty place. He walked in to see them admiring the woodwork on the cabinets. Babs was running her hand with the short shiny-buffed
fingernails over the wood. What was she feeling for? She knew nothing about wood. Less about kitchens.

“Hon-bun, look at this amazing kitchen,” Babs said.

David and Babs had been together for two years and she’d never cooked one meal. Either they went out, sent out, or he cooked.

“It’s a kitchen all right,” he said.

“Oh, Barbara, you know men don’t give a good gosh darn about kitchens,” said Babs’s sister, with a conspiratorial glance at
Daphy, who giggled in agreement. Babs’s sister—who looked, sadly, like a much less attractive version of Babs but who wore
the same hairdo and the same style of clothes in an unsuccessful effort to be the same type—linked arms with Babs, and with
Daphne following behind them they walked out of the kitchen, through the crystal chandeliered foyer, into the roller-skating-rink-size
living room. David leaned against the kitchen counter staring blankly through the French doors to the forest behind the house.
He was worrying about all the work he should be doing at the office. When Babsy called this morning and pleaded with him to
come to lunch at the club and then house-hunting, just for a few hours, God knows why he didn’t tell her it would have to
wait until Saturday. Now he could hear his wife and his sister-in-law heading up the wide marble staircase.

“Daph,” David said, walking into the living room, where Daphne was opening the drapes to reveal a glen of stunning
lilac trees, “not that there’s a chance in the world that I’m your customer, but how much is this place?”

“Two five,” she said, “but confidentially, I think you could get it for two million. The seller is anxious. What do you think?”

“I think if I had a house worth that much sitting unsold, ‘anxious’ wouldn’t begin to describe me.”

“David?” he heard Babs calling from upstairs. “You
have
to see the tile in the bathroom.”

David and Daphy walked up the stairs. Babs stood at the top, eyes huge with excitement. Babsy. He loved her. She was beautiful
and brilliant and she would have had her law degree by now if she hadn’t dropped out of school “just to vegetate” for a while.
Her perfect blond bob bounced around her neck—that adorable neck, the back of which he loved to kiss—and she walked ahead
of all of them now into the master suite, which opened onto a porch that sat nestled in the luscious lilac trees.

“I am passionate for this house,” she said, looking first at David and then at her sister, who said, “I love it too. It’s
perfect.” And then at Daphy, who agreed. “Oh, yes. Perfect.”

David took a deep breath. There was a frantic edge in Babs’s voice when she said to Daphy: “Tell us all the statistics. I
think it’s us.”

Before Daphy could say a word, David spoke, going to Babsy’s side and puffing an arm around her. Sometimes she was such a
little girl. With all her education and sophistication, she still didn’t have any sense about…

“Darling, this house is selling for two and a half million dollars,” he said, certain that fact would make her gasp and they
would be in the car in a minute on their way back to take a look at the perfect house in Mandeville Canyon for which the asking
price was $850,000.

“So?” she said instead, extending her lower lip in that way David had, in the past, told her he loved. “I mean, I am Mrs.
Malcolm now.” David could see that even Babs’s sister was embarrassed by that one.

“And that means?” David asked.

“That I can afford it,” Babs said, with a little laugh he’d heard her use to mean
I’m only joking.
But she wasn’t

“It’s wrong for us, Barbara,” David said. Now he realized Aat she was very serious.

“Why?” Babs asked, face tense and looking as if she
might cry. He had never ever seen her cry. Daphne and his sister-in-law left the room so quickly that they nearly collided
getting to the door.

“It’s too big, it’s too much to maintain, but most of all, it gives us nothing to look forward to. Where do you go if you
have a house like this at our age?”

“You sound like your father.”

“Goddamned right.”

“Don’t swear at me, David.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I want to see the wine cellar.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in the car.”

“I hate Mandeville Canyon,” she said. Her face looked mean now, as if she were talking about some vile enemy. “If there’s
a fire, you can’t get out of the canyon at the top. I won’t live there.”

“Then we’ll keep looking.”

“Why won’t you even…”

“Babs, you’re acting like people you say you can’t stand when
they
act like this.”

“I’m going to see the wine cellar,” she said, and breezed by him.

This will pass, he said to himself, and walked down the marble staircase. From somewhere in the house he could hear Daphy
pointing out the features in what was probably the same voice she’d used when she was a docent at the Art Museum. He walked
outside and got into his car to wait. Babsy would recover. She was probably just going through the adjustment that all new
brides do. Not sure how to behave or what he expected of her. She was so young and all she knew about the world was the way
she had seen her parents live, and her friends’ parents.

The three women emerged from the house and got back into the car, and when he dropped them at their own cars at the parking
lot at the club he got a kiss on each cheek and an invitation to dinner from Daphy, a pat on the hand from his sister-in-law
that seemed almost sympathetic, and a curt goodbye from his wife.

His desk at the office was piled high with messages: the foreman of the mill in Mississippi, one of the corporate officers
in New York. His father had left a message at nine and another at noon, and he had to return a call to the
pilots and let them know he needed to fly to Canada on Monday and… His private line rang. Babs.