Sugar Time

by Jane Adams

  “Really? I’m fine, honey. I’m really fine. Maybe you’re tuned into somebody else’s old lady.”

  “It sure felt like it was you. I talked to Jessie and she said the baby had been kicking the hell out of her, but otherwise she was okay.”

  “You didn’t tell her you were worried about me, did you?”

  ‘’ ‘Course not,” he said.

  “Did you talk to your father, too?”

  “Uh uh.” Paul had never quite forgiven Ted for dumping me—his loyalty warmed me like a sweater on a chilly night.

  “How are you? Anything new in your life? Or anyone?” I chose my words carefully, lest he think I was “pressuring” him. Peggy, who’s a therapist, once said of a mutual friend whose son has never lived up to their expectations, “It must be hard to always be told how much potential you have. It must be easier just not to do anything, for fear you won’t meet all those expectations.” She wasn’t talking about Paul—at least I don’t think she was—but her words hit me with a powerful jolt of insight into my own child.

  “Just pounding nails,” he said. Paul dropped out of UC halfway through and never went back. Whenever the subject of how he’s wasting his life comes up, my mother says, “What did you think would happen when you told him to do what he wanted as long as it made him happy? Whoever said you’re supposed to be happy?” I don’t get defensive any more, I just change the subject. Paul, who’s 30, pretty much treats the future as if it’s the present that just hasn’t happened yet. But at least he’s not in jail or on the streets, a couple of alternate lifestyles I pondered more than once as he made his leisurely way toward adulthood.

  There were a few other messages but nothing that couldn’t wait, so I filled the big old-fashioned claw-footed tub, which is one of the best things about my apartment besides the rent, and tossed in a couple of capfuls of Badedas. I lit a cigarette and took a long drag, immersing myself up to my neck in the hot foamy water. I always had my last cigarette of the day in the tub: My New Year’s resolution this year had been to give up giving up smoking, and I was sticking to it. The visitation from the octopus was not going to change that, or anything else.

  Later, in bed, I watched Letterman’s monologue and then I snapped off the TV and picked up the book I’d been reading when the octopus struck. It was another of those novels whose time seems suddenly to have arrived, about a group of women taking the body or the ashes of their friend on its final journey. Hag lit, Suzanne calls it—the new publishing zeitgeist, all these stories of college roommates whose lives have gone in unexpected ways confronting the distance from their youth and their own mortality when the first of them dies.

  My mother used to steer the conversation away from topics that were unpleasant or threatened to provoke a fight by saying, “The subject is not of general interest.” That was exactly how I felt, so I dropped the book on the floor, turned off the light and turned over. Tory snuggled up closer next to me, and we called it a night.

  ...........................................................

  “You said you’d be here when the baby was born.”

  “I know, and I will be. But that’s still two months off. Have you seen the doctor this week? What did he say?”

  “The usual. Everything’s fine, don’t worry, take your vitamins, go out with your husband for dinner and a movie while you still can. As if !”

  My grown-up daughter sounded more like a grumpy teenager than a woman in the last trimester of pregnancy. My son-in-law Zach is a talented chef who plans to open his own restaurant one of these days, which means dining out is research, not romance. He already has two willing investors ready to back him—the befoodifuls, Jessie calls them, some wealthy Angelenos who’ve followed Zach’s career from the little bistro in the Valley where he was a sous-chef when Jessie met him to a bigger job at a restored Hollywood landmark and finally to his present position as executive chef at a restaurant so exclusive it has an unlisted phone number and no prices on the menu. But when it’s your own restaurant, you don’t leave at seven or take two consecutive days off, so ‘one of these days’ is somewhere in the future, between the baby’s arrival and his high school graduation. Jessie’s been on maternity leave for most of her pregnancy—she’s an artist’s rep for a big music label, which means late nights at smoky clubs. It’s not the best atmosphere for a mother-to-be, especially one who’s already had two miscarriages, and although she vows to return after the baby is born, once she has a real baby to care for she may be less interested in the tantrums and demands of the overgrown ones she works with.

  She sounded lonely and exasperated and bored, but I resisted the impulse to say, Well why don’t I come out and keep you company? I was tempted; it wouldn’t hurt to be in L.A. when the network made the decision about the pilot, and I really didn’t have anything else planned. But then I remembered the two steep flights of stairs you have to climb just to get to the front door of Zach and Jessie’s rented house in Echo Park, and the three other flights once you’re inside. I am an old hand at wrestling mother guilt to the ground—unlike other kinds, it leaves stretch marks and never goes away—so I told her I’d see her soon and rang off.

  By late that afternoon, a cold front had blown in, reason enough to spend the weekend inside, on the couch or in bed, dozing and reading and watching old movies on TV. I didn’t feel much like talking to anyone, so I let the messages pile up on the answering machine and turned off my cell phone. Later, when I figured the callers wouldn’t be home, I’d ring back, say “Phone tag—you’re it, catch you later,” and hang up.

  Writers aren’t solitary by nature, at least I’m not, but sometimes you just have to hang around yourself in order to do the work. If I’m on deadline I do the phone tag thing, but otherwise I reach out and touch someone a few times a day, just to get out of my own head. That weekend I didn’t talk to anyone, but every time I heard the phone ring I felt a small twinge of reassurance. I’d never be one of those paragraphs in the Daily News, someone whose dead body isn’t discovered until the smell alerts the neighbors. Not that I haven’t played that scenario in my mind before—I don’t know any single woman who hasn’t. But this time it seemed to resonate on a different frequency.

  By Monday I was feeling a lot more like myself, so I spent the morning putting the final touches on a rewrite for a Lifetime movie based on a best-selling novel about a murdered teenager who manages to send her clever younger sister clues from the great beyond about the identity of her killer. Then I surfed the Web for a few minutes. Google had millions of hits about heart disease, but after I clicked on a couple, I realized I really didn’t want to know any more than I already did, which is definitely not like me. I am an information junkie, a research hound since my first job as a fact checker at the New Yorker; if you needed an answer on the Sunday Double Crostic or a Life Line on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, I’m the one you’d call, and if I didn’t already know the answer I’d mouse it up in a nanosecond.

  I closed out of Windows, fixed a tuna sandwich and tackled my bills.

  You know you’ve become a woman of a certain age when the anxiety dream about oversleeping your SAT’s turns into the one about being a middle class bag lady. Until I sold the article to the L.A. Weekly, which led to the book, which sank like a stone until it came to the attention of a TV agent, who put me together with a producer…well, at least that far back, when I was regretting not giving into the impulse to bankrupt the Tortmaster for his misdeeds, I was skilled and devious in the art of stretching a free-lancer’s occasional paydays well past the second or third notice from a creditor. I’d “forget” to sign my name on an otherwise clearly written check or I’d purposely put the pediatrician’s payment in the envelope addressed to the dentist. When someone called from Delinquent Accounts, I’d identify myself as the baby-sitter, all the while wondering what those accounts did when no one was looking—joyride in borrowed cars, knock up teenage girls, get kicked out of high school?

  The show chang
ed all that, and I’d had a good run in the stock market, but those days were gone and money was getting to be a headache again. I wrote out checks for the taxes on the L.A. house that were due at the end of the month, which was also when my tenant’s lease expired, and for my health insurance, whose first bill of the new year came with a particularly unpleasant addendum this time-not just the usual rate raise but a notice that this year my very own personal hike included a “decade surcharge.”

  I had had a very good time in my financial go-go days, indulging myself and those I loved in ways large and small. But as I wrote out the checks I wondered, not for the first time, what I’d do if the network didn’t green light the new show, which was far from a sure thing. The only other possibilities I could conjure up that might save me from my reckless financial ways—winning the lottery or finding a rich husband—were equally improbable…given the odds on getting a pilot made, let alone a series, I’d have a better shot at either of those.

  The house in Laurel Canyon, which I got in the divorce and where I raised the kids, was supposed to be my hedge against growing old in poverty. But I’d refinanced so often there probably wasn’t enough equity left in it to keep me for more than a few years—another stupid decision in the low interest, high flying days of the tech boom, when I borrowed on margin to finance my indulgences. When it all came to a crashing halt, I took a big hit in the pocketbook, but unfortunately, my spending habits didn’t change, too. I just went on merrily living on the come—the next big deal was coming soon, and after that one failed to materialize or went south, well, there would always be another one…that’s the Hollywood line, equal parts hope and hype, and it’s an easy one to fall for when you’re young.

  In fact, The Lifetime script was the only deal my agent had made for me in so long I’d started to worry that he’d drop me as a client. Sandro’s hints about how TV is a young person’s game these days weren’t entirely lost on me—how could they be, given his hair plugs, Botox, and the personal trainer he’d put on his payroll? According to him it wasn’t just the talent that was getting younger and younger—“It’s the creatives, too,” he said, “the writers, directors and producers. That kid who’s running New Line now? I haven’t finished paying for his bar mitzvah present yet.”

  Sandro’s last big deal for me was Lexy’s autobiography. He made sure I got my advance up front, which was smart since Love, Lexy—her title, not mine—was on the remainder table a few months after it was published. Lexy went from starring in Going It Alone for six seasons to a couple of other series that never made it beyond thirteen weeks. In between there were a couple of stints in rehab and almost as many relapses, romances, come-backs and fade-outs as Liza’s, which made a tell-all attractive to enough publishers to bid the proposal up to six figures at an auction. Not that the book wasn’t a carefully varnished version of “all”—if I’d put in everything I knew about Lexy, she’d be lucky to get signed for a supermarket opening.

  But that money was going fast, too. By now my net worth was anorexic enough to make the Times’ “Neediest Cases” nightmare a recurring feature of my REM sleep, like every woman who’s not independently wealthy or even dependently, which is more often the case. It was also a depressing thought in the middle of an otherwise sunny day, so I dealt with it the way I usually do—I headed for Filene’s Basement.

  It was a little longer than I’d walked since coming home from the hospital, but I was feeling okay, even pretty good, until I made my way to the register with a pair of last season Blahniks. I didn’t need blue satin shoes—who does?—but they were so cheap it would have been a crime not to buy them. That’s when I bumped into Carrie.

  “Sugar, when did you get back, what’s going on? Robin said you were in Boca, I finally called her, and I’ve been leaving messages since Thursday! We had lunch Wednesday and you never said you were going away—did something happen to Frances?”

  Carrie is one of my best friends. She’s a professor of medieval literature at Columbia, although her deep, husky voice could earn her a fortune doing phone sex, which she swears she’s going to take up when academic politics finally drive her out of her sixth floor office in Philosophy Hall. The English department at Columbia is notoriously awful for women, so much so that even a distinguished scholar like Carolyn Heilbrun finally gave up and went back to writing mysteries about a college professor instead of being one.

  Carrie is married to a writer who has great hopes for posthumous recognition, since he believes the world is not ready for his genius yet. In a good month Geoffrey ekes out six pages, and then spends the next one and the one after that rewriting them, so he doesn’t publish more than once a decade, and Carrie supports them. Despite his intellectual pretensions, I love Geoffrey—he’s a bear of a man with a booming laugh and hearty good nature that belies the dark, tightly constricted novels he writes. A superb cook and a great raconteur who knows his way around the cleaning products aisle of Duane Reade, he has the sexual staying power of a man half his age. At least that’s what Carrie says. They’re an odd-looking couple; he’s enormous, and she’s barely five feet tall, thin and wiry with no excess flesh on her bones. Her hair is more silver than black now, shorter than she used to wear it; it curls around her face and softens her square, slightly pugnacious jaw, so that when she contradicts Geoffrey or teases him about his self-importance, she reminds me of a Scottie nipping at a grizzly.

  Of all the people I wasn’t ready to face yet, at least not till I had the tale of the octopus ready for public consumption, Carrie was first on my list. We talk to each other every day, and usually have coffee a couple of times a week at the Starbucks between my apartment and hers. There’s hardly anything we don’t tell each other—the good, the bad, and the dish—and if I’d called anyone from the emergency room, it would have been her. “We didn’t think you’d miss the party unless it was an emergency. Is she okay?”

  Oh, shit…that’s what all those calls over the weekend were about. I’d completely spaced Suzanne’s sixtieth birthday extravaganza.

  Carrie and I had been planning it for months. We’d already celebrated Suzanne’s actual birthday the week before at a hugely indulgent lunch at Café des Artistes, where we finished every crumb on the dessert sampler and then ordered another, because Suzanne, the first of us to hit the big six oh said that age had its privileges, among them the right to indulge ourselves in everything bad for us that we gave up years ago, like smoking, drinking, recreational drugs and chocolate mousse.

  `“When Jackie Onassis found out she had cancer, she said what she regretted most were those hundred sit-ups she used to do every day,” she told us. “She told Nan Talese if she’d known that was what was going to happen she wouldn’t have bothered.” Suzanne is an editor at Doubleday. We met when I was ghosting Lexy’s book and I introduced her to Carrie.

  I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten the party, especially since I’d made the arrangements to have it in that penthouse with the pool where Samantha was romanced by her rich boss on Sex and the City. I’d called in a favor from a location manager I knew, who got it for us practically free—which is to say, as much as I’d spend on Suzanne’s birthdays and Christmases if we both lived to be a hundred.

  I hoped the octopus hadn’t affected my brain as well as my heart, because I had one New York minute, which goes by quicker here than it does anywhere else, to come up with an emergency that would satisfy Carrie, not to mention Suzanne.

  “Frances had a stroke.” I hoped God wasn’t listening, even though I don’t believe in Him and know that even if I did, thinking doesn’t mean happening. And it wasn’t an unconscious wish on my part, either…even if my mother can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I’m not ready for her to die yet. Peggy, who used to be a Freudian analyst, says it’s difficult to mourn an ambivalently held object, so I should settle my unfinished business with Frances while I still can, which is easy for Peggy to say because she’s not her mother. “Don’t worry, she’s fine now,” I added, more to re
assure myself than allay Carrie’s concerns. “She just thought she had a stroke. Or Esme did, anyway.” Esme is my mother’s maid, confidante and companion—she moved from New Jersey to Florida with Frances after my father died, and she’s practically one of the family. “Turns out she’d played nine holes of golf that morning in 90 degree weather, and she hadn’t eaten all day—you know Frances, she’s was a bulimic before they knew what it was, she still takes ExLax every night.”

  “She does?” Carrie wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  “Mm, she says it’s because she doesn’t have time to wait for her bowels to move. Anyway, she fainted, and Esme got scared because when she came to she didn’t remember what happened. Esme called me right after she called 911, so I ran down there…I didn’t even take my cell phone.”

  “Is she still in the hospital?”

  “By the time I got there she was abusing the nurses and demanding a cigarette and a glass of scotch. They kept her overnight for observation, and then we got her home and settled in, but I couldn’t get a flight back until late last night. God, I’m sorry. You think Suzanne will ever forgive me?”

  “We were both pretty worried, especially when you did that, ‘You’re it’ thing with the phones. You only do that when you really don’t want to talk.”

  It always surprises me when my little tricks don’t fool the people who know me best. “I’ll call her as soon as I get home. I’ll send flowers. I’ll clean her closets. I’ll get her kid’s movie into Sundance,” I said.

  “Sure you will. You really ought to talk to a therapist about your grandiosity,” Carrie said dryly. “You buying those?” she asked, eyeing the Blahniks. “What, there’s an old bridesmaid’s dress in your closet you’ve been saving for a special occasion, only you didn’t have the shoes to go with it?”

  “Hope springs eternal,” I replied. “You want to go get a latte?”