Sugar Time

by Jane Adams

  Maybe it had. Not just to the fact that my kids were grown-ups now, but that I could count on them in a crisis. Count on them to care. And with that comforting thought, I hugged and kissed my son and told him to go have dinner or see a movie, I’d be fine.

  I told everyone the same story I’d told Robin and swore my kids to secrecy, too. “If it hadn’t been for Paul’s thing, you wouldn’t have told us, either,” Jessie said. “Honestly, Mom, I don’t know what the big deal is. Okay, I get why you don’t want people in the industry to know, they won’t let you finish the show or ever work again, yada yada yadda. I don’t like it and neither does Zach, or Paul, for that matter, we think it’s totally fucked but it’s your decision. But not tell your family? Your friends? What’s that about?”

  “I just don’t want them worrying about me.”

  “But they love you!” she said, exasperated.

  “I know they do. And that’s why I’m not telling them.”

  I could hear her sigh over the phone. “Have it your way. But I’ve told that lie about your appendix to Frances and Uncle Peter and Aunt Joan and so many other people that my nose looks like Barbra Streisand’s.”

  And so had I. Carrie, Peggy, Suzanne, Hallie—they thought I was in Vancouver shooting the pilot, and there was no reason to tell them otherwise, even though it was lonely in the hospital and sometimes I wished I could talk to them about what had happened. But like everyone else, they had problems of their own, and I didn’t want to be one of them. The one person I hadn’t figured out how or what to tell was Alex Carroll.

  I’d stood him up for lunch, and by the time I realized I was going to live I knew I couldn’t tell him why. I finally sent him an e-mail in the middle of the week, apologizing—there’d been an emergency on the set, I’d had to leave in a hurry, I’d had a wonderful time and hoped to see him again when my life wasn’t so crazy, etcetera. But I wasn’t ready to lie to him in person yet.

  I didn’t want him to think about me the way I was thinking about myself—like I was frighteningly, immediately, mortally vulnerable. As if I were going to die, not in the comfortably far off future but at any minute.

  In fact, I probably wasn’t. By the end of the week, Kaplan was looking positively upbeat and said he was taking me off the medication they were giving me intravenously.

  “Does that mean I can leave?”

  ‘Not yet,” he said. “When you were brought in, your heart was only able to pump out around fifteen percent of the blood it contained. Now it’s up to nearly 40.”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Fifty to sixty percent. I won’t discharge you until it’s been at least 50 for three days. I’d be happier with a week.”

  “I can’t stay that long.”

  He shrugged. “That’s up to you. But I think you’re making a mistake.”

  The next day there was a knock on my door. “Ms. Kane? I’m Marian Nelson. Dr. Kaplan thought you might be interested in some reading material.”

  She handed me a stack of pamphlets. The one on top was titled “Stressed For Success?” and the others were variations on the same theme.

  “These have some exercises and techniques that can help you manage your condition,” she said. “I’d be glad to go over them with you.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “I’m a little tired now.”

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

  Paul didn’t leave Seattle until I did—he insisted on accompanying me to Vancouver in the town car the studio sent to pick me up. I was glad for the company, despite his uneasiness about my decision to go back to work so soon. Before he left me at the hotel, he reminded me that very few people remarked on their deathbed that they wished they’d spent more time at the office. “I know you have to finish this job,” he said. “Just don’t let it finish you, okay?”

  “It will take a lot more than that to finish me,” I said. “Go. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  I was on the set at six the next morning and hardly anyone seemed to notice it was the first time I’d made an appearance. I hung back, not exactly hiding, just watching and listening. We were only half a page off our schedule, which was pretty good considering, and so far the results looked fine. Derek was happy with the performances he was getting from the cast, especially Chloe—“She’s going to be huge,” he said, “You’d better sign her to a run of the series contract while you can.”

  “If there is a series,” I said. “First things first.”

  He’d replaced the actor who played Clea’s boyfriend, who’d turned up too loaded to work for two days in a row. “Vancouver’s a good place to be if you have a habit,” Robin told me, “You can walk through Gastown and get what you need in a heartbeat.” And he and Robin were still mulling over whether to replace Denise Gale, who’d auditioned so well for the role of Amelia’s assistant but was a disaster on camera.

  “She might work better as a voice, off screen,” Robin suggested. “You know, someone we never see. She has that neurotic New York thing going, that voice is like a cross between Rhoda Morgenstern and the Nanny.”

  “No wonder I hate her,” I replied. “I’ll tell the DP to cover the shots so we can do it in post if we want to.”

  “Actually, I already mentioned it to Jim,” she said. “He’s taking care of it.”

  A lot of what a show-runner does is wheedling, cajoling, pacifying and ass kissing, and Robin outshone me in all those departments. When it came to dealing with guys, she deployed her southern charm like a weapon, honeying them this and sweetieing them that so they ended up convinced that all her good ideas were actually theirs—sort of the way she’d operated with me, too, except I always knew when she was shining me on. It was a big temptation to let her continue to run the show, but if I didn’t want my baby to get completely away from me, I had to let people know who was really in charge. When a man does that, he’s being assertive—when it’s a woman, she gets labeled ball-buster, bitch, or worse. So I took a cue from Robin and did my own version of honey this and sweetie that, oh you big smart man, however did you think of that, only without the southern accent. I used to do that feminine soothing and stroking and accommodating not only well but automatically, although the older I get, the harder it is—or, as Suzanne says, “Welcome to the Fuck You Fifties.”

  It’s also exhausting, and at night I fell into bed too tired to worry that I might not wake up the next morning—a recurring fear the whole time I was in the hospital. On the suggestion of that woman Kaplan sent into my hospital room with the pamphlets I hired a yoga trainer who came to my room every morning: Exhaling my breath the way she demonstrated was like bathing my heart in champagne and I visualized little bubbles spreading oxygen through my bloodstream. At night they brought dinner in while we all went over the next day’s schedules and call sheets and reviewed the dailies, Back at the hotel I swam laps in the hotel pool or had a massage before I went to bed. Meanwhile we kept on shooting, and by the time Nelly came up with her entourage from L.A., we were less than a week from completion and looking pretty good, all things considered.

  Then disaster struck. Gerard, who played Jean Paul, the semi-retired jewel thief, collapsed on the set and died on the way to the hospital. It was a massive stroke; nothing could have saved him. His part wasn’t finished yet—he had one key scene left and two smaller ones, and it was way too late to replace him with another actor. I sweated through thirty six straight hours with my production and writing staffs, re-jiggering everything to cover Gerard’s absence, trying to ignore the clammy, woozy light-headedness that came and went, wondering if every twinge in my chest was the octopus and taking my pulse when I thought no one was looking. All the while I kept telling myself, Sugar you can do this, you can handle this, this isn’t really endangering your health, it’s just for a little while, when we wrap you’ll go to bed for a week. Or, as Frances always said, you can sleep when you’re dead.

  Gerard’s death hit us all hard. He was a favorite wi
th everyone from his co-stars to the lowliest member of the crew; he was one of those people who make coming to work a pleasure. Plus he’d been perfect for his role, exactly what I wanted when I created it. He and Anne had such good chemistry together I’d been thinking about bringing him back as a continuing love interest for Amelia if the pilot made it to a series.

  Calling Gerard’s wife in Paris to break the news, saying those irrevocable words to a stranger, a disembodied voice on the phone, was heartbreaking. Both Derek and Robin had offered to do it, but it was my responsibility, although they came with me to the airport to meet her plane.

  When Gerard’s shockingly young widow arrived to claim his body she was accompanied by his first wife, a woman close to my own age. She handled the formalities of his death as briskly and efficiently as a Parisian concierge, insisting on making the arrangements for the repatriation of his body and presenting the necessary papers for Danielle’s signature, and it was she rather than Danielle who came to the set and thanked Gerard’s colleagues for their condolences. It was almost as if Gerard had two widows—Julia, who’d shared thirty five years of his life, managed his career and raised his children, and the younger, prettier version, Danielle, for whom he’d publicly humiliated and abandoned her. But she was tender with her successor, and Danielle was equally respectful of her; “It’s so European, isn’t it?” said Robin.

  “When Mitterand died, his wife and his mistress both came to the funeral, along with their kids,” I replied. “After all, it was the French who invented the fait accompli.”

  Finally, it was done. We wrapped two days over schedule with a minimum amount of complaining from the higher-ups, who didn’t have much choice; even I couldn’t be held responsible for an act of God. Besides, they thought they could capitalize on the tragedy: Gerard was a popular actor who’d broken into films after a long career as an entertainer, a sort of Johnny Holliday type, and the pilot would be his first as well as his last TV performance. “We own the rights for that revival he did of the Maurice Chevalier role in Gigi a few years ago,” Nelly told me. “If we air it before the pilot, we might get some extra press out of it. Of course, that all depends.”

  On whether you screw it up in the post, she was probably thinking, but I tried not to obsess about that. I had five days before post-production started, and I was going to spend three of them with Alex Carroll.

  Except for a brief fling once with a stuntman, I’ve never gone in for guys who took risks the way Alex did. He routinely ventured into places anyone with a brain in their head would never voluntarily go—under oceans, up cliffs, to the summits of mountains, and, more immediately, twenty thousand feet up in the air. I could feel the beads of sweat clam up on my forehead.

  “Would it help if I had a uniform with epaulets and a shiny badge?” Alex teased as he helped me into the cockpit and motioned me to a seat next to his.

  “It would help more if we took a ferry there,” I grumbled. “Is this your plane? How long have you been flying?”

  “About ten years,” he said, doing something with the controls. “This is the second plane I’ve owned.”

  “What happened to the first one?”

  “I traded it in—why, you think I crashed it?” He smiled. “Ferries take forever. I have a cabin in the San Juans, and the schedules are spotty, especially off-season. It’s quicker to fly. And more fun.”

  “Is that where we’re going?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “Unless you have any objections,” he said. “It’s quiet, pretty low-key, but I think you’ll like it. And I’m not a bad cook. Okay?”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. Which I did, except for how we were getting there. I’d left the arrangements for the weekend up to Alex; I’d made enough decisions for a while. “I’m ready to be the girl for a change, let someone else be in charge,” I told Carrie on the phone that morning as I packed my things, carefully folding the La Perla underwear I’d bought for my last date with Alex.

  “Ri-i-ight,” she said knowingly. “Because you’re so good at that.”

  When Alex called from downstairs to tell me he’d arrived, Robin had just knocked on my door to say goodbye, and we took the elevator downstairs together. “You didn’t tell me he was so Clint Eastwood!” she whispered as he came toward us. He was wearing black jeans, Tony Lama boots and a leather jacket, and he looked like a kazillion dollars. “And those eyes,” she added, “Wow! Have a fabulous time, Sugar—you really deserve it.”

  There was nothing wrong with what she said, but it sounded just the other side of patronizing. Or maybe I was overreacting—-Get over it, Sugar, I told myself as we left the hotel, concentrate on him, not her. Which is just what I was doing as I buckled myself into the co-pilot’s seat and Alex went through his preflight checklist. “Stop looking so worried,” he said. “She’s just had her annual maintenance check-up.”

  “What about you? Have you just had yours?”

  His eyes changed color then, although maybe it was just the reflection of the sun streaming through the Plexiglas window in the cockpit. “I have a flight physical every year,” he said tightly. “Chances are good to excellent that I won‘t keel over ‘till we’re on solid ground.”

  I wish I could say the same thing, I thought, but once we leveled off I opened my eyes. We were flying over the straits of Juan de Fuca between Canada and Washington; it was a beautiful day and there was barely a cloud in the sky. “Look—down there,” said Alex, and I followed his pointing finger to what looked like enormous black logs gliding along on top of the water. When he flew lower I saw they were actually whales; as we circled above them they breached the surface and fell back in the water again and again, emitting bushy clouds of vapor through their blowholes, slapping the sea with their tails and spraying huge gouts of water in every direction. “Spy hopping,” said Alex, “That’s what they’re doing, it’s a new word to add to your list. They’re migrating up from Baja this time of year. If the weather holds, we can kayak with them tomorrow.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  He grinned. “Isn’t everything that’s worth doing?” Then he saw the look I gave him. “It’s actually very safe. I’ve taken my 83 year old mother sea kayaking, and she loved it.”

  “So the risk gene is inherited, huh?”

  “My mother’s idea of risk is making left turns or playing the quarters slots in Atlantic City.”

  “Making left turns?”

  “Mmm hmm. If she can’t get where she’s going driving straight or turning right, she doesn’t go. Even if there’s a left turn arrow on the signal and it’s green. Okay, now—close your eyes again, we’re landing.”

  Actually, I thought, it would be fantastic to be out on the water among those graceful giants instead of watching from a distance. “Thank you so much, that was an amazing experience,” I said as he turned off the ignition.

  “The flight or the whales?”

  “Both.” It was true—once I got over my initial nervousness, being in the cockpit with him was okay—all right, better than that. Some women get an erotic charge from men who know how to do stuff, whether it’s fly a plane or put on a roof. It’s why guys in tool belts stir us up—the sheer masculine physicality of it. (It’s also why when I remodeled the studio, it took me twice as long as it should have and cost twice as much as it was supposed to—I had an affair with the contractor, and even though the place looked terrific, when the job was over I was miserable and lonely.)

  We got into a beat-up old Volvo parked at the little airport on the island and drove almost to the other end of it before we came to his house, a weathered log A-frame set amid towering evergreens on a bluff facing the Sound. Inside it was simplicity itself—a great room whose salient feature was a river rock hearth with a fireplace big enough to stand up in, furnished in Early Summer Rental with an oval rag rug in front of the hearth, a faded velour La-Z-Boy and oak rocking chair flanking it, and a long cracked leather couch with rump-spru
ng cushions.

  “The accommodations are up here,” he said, leading the way upstairs. “Take your pick,” he said. “Garden or ocean view?”

  It was obvious which bedroom was his, so I pointed to the other, which overlooked the back of the thickly forested property. I’d wondered about the sleeping arrangements, rehearsing several potential scenarios the way I always do, but Alex took the awkwardness out of the situation. “Good choice,” he said, “that’s the one with the hot tub. Do you want the ten cent tour first, or would you rather unpack?”

  There wasn’t much more to see. The house looked like the kind of place that’s been in someone’s family for years, which according to Alex it had been. “I saw it right before the kids put it on the market,” he said. “They were sad to think whoever bought it would probably tear it down because there were a lot of happy memories in it, and I told them I wouldn’t, I didn’t want to change anything, which clinched the deal. There was already an outdoor shower on the deck off the guest room—I just added the tub.”

  Outside the air was a potpourri of fragrance—grapey-smelling wild irises, the salty tang of the sea, and the breeze-borne aroma of pine and fir trees. At the top of the wooden stairs that led down to the beach, Alex picked up a galvanized tin pail. “The tide’s out,” he said. “Do you like oysters?”

  We picked them off the beach until we’d filled the bucket and then he rowed us out to a buoy a couple of hundred feet from shore. Pulling a crab pot out of the water, he beamed and tossed it in the boat. “These are the first ones I’ve pulled in a month,” he said. “Looks like dinner’s on mother nature tonight. She must really want to impress you.”

  “So far she’s doing a very good job,” I said. “And so are you.”

  By the time we got back to the house we were thirsty, so we drank a bottle of white burgundy while he put the coals on and cleaned the crab and I made a salad and set the picnic table on the front deck. We drank half of another one while we grilled and ate the oysters, and the rest while making a slurping, licking, happily messy meal of the crab. By the time we finished I was a little bit tipsy, and maybe he was, too—it was hard to tell, I didn’t know him well enough yet.