“Yes, that’s actually exactly what I’m doing.”
“Damn it. You’re literate. And you’re a movie star. Damn. And you’re adorable. Damn, damn, damn.”
“And I love women of a certain age.” Clive leaned over and gave Lala a relatively chaste peck on the cheek.
“That’s the title of my next novel,” Lala told him. “And the character based on you is being skewered in the manuscript, trust me.”
“Ohh, I love being skewered. Can I play him in the movie version?”
Lala laughed. “What am I gonna say? No?” She put her head on his shoulder for a moment, and just as quickly lifted it again. “Fuck it. I can’t let it go. Tell me about your manager.”
Clive sighed.
“If you insist. Garrett is my aunt’s widower. She died just a few years after they were married. He never got over it. That was decades ago. He completely changed. He was a sweet guy before he lost her. I let him think he’s my manager. I don’t really need a manager at this point, but I take him most everywhere with me when I’m conducting business. It gives him something to do. He’s so alone.”
Lala put her sandwich down on her lap and put her head in her hands.
Don’t cry, she thought. Your face gets so red and puffy when you cry. Really, much more than might be considered normal.
“God, you are a sweet man,” she said through her fingers. She lowered her hands. “But . . . but . . . doesn’t his . . . well, you know . . . his remarkably unpleasant attitude cost you work?”
Now it was Clive’s turn to guffaw.
“Oh, you darling, naïve woman-of-a-certain-age. Of course it doesn’t. I’m a fucking movie star.”
They both chuckled and smiled and didn’t feel the need to say much else as they sat for a few more minutes to finish their sandwiches. Lala insisted that Clive leave her at the end of her street and not walk her all the way to her door.
“I can’t flirt with you anymore today, Clive. I just can’t. I feel like I’m back in college. And I’m liking that feeling. I have to call time-out on this. At least for today. Okay?”
Lala kissed him on both cheeks, lingering a moment too long on each, and sauntered up her street, turning once to see if he was watching her walk away, seeing that he was, and waving and smiling with an insouciant wink.
He probably can’t see my fetching little wink anyway, Lala thought by way of an excuse for continuing to flirt with the sexy movie star.
She pivoted back toward her building and managed to resist a churning urge to turn around yet another time.
Okay, so, when I get home, I’ll . . . I wonder if Clive’s still watching me . . . Stop that! Okay, let’s change the subject. David. Mon cher David, David, David. I have got to think of something more creative than “Busy on set, bisous, bisous, bisous.” I’m suddenly inspired by my new novel? That’s actually true. File that for future use. I’m walking around Paris every moment I’m not on set or not writing or not sleeping and I wish you were here to enjoy this beautiful city with me? Also true on all counts. Filed. I’ve hit my head and lost my memory, who are you and why do you want to Skype with me?
While Lala was still musing, she walked into the courtyard and saw Kenny being berated by a young woman. As she got closer, she saw that he had a small bowl clutched in his left hand, which was bent behind his back to hide what he was holding. The young woman was dressed immaculately if in a somewhat clichéd fashion in a suit that was most probably an actual vintage Chanel. Her jet-black hair was closely cropped and her pale, pinched face was surrounded by tight curls. But for the huffing tirade that was spewing from her bright red lips, she might have been very attractive. She was yelling in rapid French, and Lala couldn’t make out many of the individual words.
Did she just say . . . yeah, no, other than the ones that are also words in English that she’s just saying in French with her prissy little French accent, I’m getting nothing here, Lala thought.
She didn’t pause to debate her options. Largely because she couldn’t think of more than one. She quickly crossed the courtyard and got right in front of Kenny, positioning herself between him and his tormentor. She stuck out her hand.
“Lala Pettibone. Nous sommes nous rencontrés?”
Okay, not the most innovative dialogue, but I’m working on the fly here. And I’m working on the fly in French. So I think I deserve to be cut rather a large swath of slack.
The young woman visibly softened in response to Lala’s words. Which meant she had gone from looking like a prison warden dealing with a jailbreak to a prison librarian dealing with a severely overdue book.
“Ohhh,” the young woman oozed. “Madame Pettibone! Our American. How lovely to meet you.”
And we immediately switch to English because my French accent is obviously so entirely for shit. And how is it that she’s hitting every consonant in my name with quite so much aggression? That’s not what the French do. It’s Puh-teee-boh, babe.
Lala turned and opened the circle to include Kenny. She immediately saw that he had both his hands back in front of him, and she was relieved that he had grabbed the opportunity of her intended distraction to stash a bowl that was, for some reason, strictly forbidden.
“I am Celestine Barrault. My father and I are honored to be your hosts.”
“Then you are exactly the person I wanted to speak with,” Lala said with forced conviviality. “Please convey to your father, as well, that I couldn’t be happier with my accommodations. And Kenny and his grandfather have been absolutely wonderful to me. I appreciate them tremendously.”
Celestine wrinkled her nose and pursed her lips. She gave Kenny a curt little nod, and then, while still wrinkling her nose in a royally disdainful fashion, spoke to Lala with unctuousness that could rival Uriah Heep’s.
“How nice. Well, Madame . . .”
And here she paused.
“. . . Pettt-eeeettttt-BOWWWNNN. I won’t keep you.”
Celestine turned on her white and black patent leather kitten heels and clip-clapped out over the cobblestones. Lala and Kenny were silent as they diligently listened to the sound of her footsteps continue down the sidewalk and disappear into the ether. And then they burst out laughing.
“What the fuck was that, Kenny? And where’s the bowl? In your butt crack?”
“Yeah, more or less,” Kenny wheezed through short, rapid bursts of cackles.
Lala stopped chortling. She saw a quick, sudden movement in the doorway leading to the small garden directly behind the building.
“Is that cat feral?” she whispered.
Kenny was immediately silent and unmoving. His response was barely audible.
“She was. She’s been letting me pet her.”
“I need to think. Let’s go to my apartment.”
As calmly and quietly as possible, they made their way out of the courtyard to the staircase leading to Lala’s apartment. Once inside, Lala turned to Kenny and spoke with urgency.
“Have you seen other cats in that garden?”
“Yup,” Kenny said. “I leave food out for them. Madame Defarge suspects something, I’m sure.”
“We need humane traps. And we need to see if any are tame and if they are, we need to find homes for them. And we need to get them all spayed and neutered. And we need to get the feral ones into a safe situation so we can maintain a managed colony for them.”
And I think I just found another supremely sympathetic reason why I’ll be much too busy to Skype with David very often.
At Minimum, You Should At Least Try, N’est-Ce Pas?
Kenny went downstairs to the restaurant to make sure his grandfather and the chefs and servers had it all under control. He came back with an enormous Caesar salad.
They put the large bowl in the middle of Lala’s small dining table and ate directly from it.
Lala told Kenn
y all about her life as an animal rescuer.
“The cats are lucky I found you,” he said.
“Well,” she responded, “let’s hope we can do something to help them together. Without Fifi de ForFuckSake catching on. Did you make this dressing, too?” It was a light ranch concoction that Lala already adored.
Kenny nodded, his mouth too full to respond verbally. Lala’s mouth was also full, but that wasn’t going to stop her from gabbing.
“Damn. We are manufacturing and marketing all your stuff, I swear to god. Okay, okay, okay, I really want to go out and just grab that semi-feral kitten and just bring her in here because I’ve seen her and now it’s personal, and I don’t want her to spend another night outside, cold and afraid, but, MERDE, that’s not a good idea because if we don’t succeed in catching her, she’ll be spooked and she’ll never come near us again, and it’s too late to get humane traps tonight, so we should—”
“Lala, I think it’s either got to be eat or pontificate, or it may get dangerous in terms of the possibility of you choking.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
They finished the salad, and Kenny rushed downstairs to get some homemade lime sorbet for them to share. During the few minutes he was gone, Lala fretted about the cats and about what the time it was in California because she was having trouble subtracting nine hours. When Kenny ran back in, she jumped out of her seat.
The sorbet was delicious.
“Don’t tell me you made this. We are going to have a food empire, mon cher.”
They made a plan to find humane traps the next day so they could start trapping the following night, and to figure out where to take the cats for spaying and neutering. Wonderful David, Lala felt sure, would be a big help with this.
“Good humane rescue work, Kenny,” Lala said at her door as she bid him goodnight. “You’re a natural at this. You saw the cats, you stepped in to help. Apparently you were concerned that I wouldn’t adore you enough for your expert cooking and your humbling grasp of the beautiful French language and your excellent accent and all the warmth and kindness you’ve shown me. Dors bien, mon cher. Hey, do you like men or women? I’m a natural yenta, and if you’re not seeing anyone, I’m going to make it my mission, along with saving the cats, to find the perfect match for you.”
“Men,” Kenny said. “And I’m currently single.”
“Not for long,” Lala said, and she winked at him.
Lala changed into a pair of sweats and a cotton sweater. She put on the television for the background soundtrack of her life, and she got comfortable on the sofa with her laptop.
I miss David, Lala thought. Merde, merde, merde, I miss him so much.
She focused on the TV screen, where a panelist on a talk show was, as far as Lala could tell, either furious about the bottled water that was being provided in the green room or about election tampering in Monaco.
Fuck it, Lala thought. Sometimes you just have to make yourself vulnerable to the uncertainties of love. Plus, I’m feeling exceptionally horny.
She flipped open her laptop and then clicked on her e-mail, intending to write to David to see if this was a good time to Skype. There was an e-mail from her Auntie Geraldine waiting for her, with a lot of shouting in the subject line.
EMERGENCY! SKYPE WITH ME IMMEDIATELY!
Oh, no, Lala thought. No. Please. Don’t let anyone be dead. Don’t let anyone be sick.
Lala’s hand shook as she tried to get the mouse to bring up the Skype connection. It was probably no slower than usual, but it felt like eons to her. At last, she was able to smack the cursor on the number to connect with Geraldine.
Please pick up. What time did she send that e-mail? Please, please, please be there.
The screen of the laptop flickered as Geraldine answered on her computer. She was sitting at her desk with a large mug of coffee and a bagel. Petunia was squished onto her lap and was whimpering for a taste of breakfast.
“Hush, sweetheart,” Geraldine said. She kissed the old dog on the forehead. “There you are,” she then said in an accusing tone to Lala.
“Omigod!” Lala yelped. “What’s wrong? Is anyone sick? What’s wrong!”
“No one’s sick,” Geraldine said, looking at the screen as though her cyber conversation partner had completely lost her mind. “What makes you think anyone’s sick?”
“YOU WROTE ‘EMERGENCY’!” Lala yelled. Geraldine frowned, and Petunia tilted her head in the universal hound symbol of confusion.
“It is an emergency,” Geraldine huffed. “You have been in touch with David with less and less frequency, and he is very concerned about that. Do not tell him I told you that. He asked me not to tell you.”
“THAT’S NOT AN EMERGENCY! ILLNESS AND DEATH ARE AN EMERGENCY!”
“STOP SHOUTING!” Geraldine shouted.
Petunia grabbed the opportunity provided by the loud kerfuffle to snatch the bagel out of Geraldine’s grasp.
“Petunia!” Geraldine said. “Bad girl!”
Good girl, Lala thought. One for our side.
Geraldine turned her attention back to being annoyed with her adopted niece.
“I am not here to debate the definition of emergency with you. Power outages are emergencies. Running out of gas is an emergency. Eating too much delicious ice cream last night after seeing a movie with your wonderful husband and waking up feeling bloated but still eating, well, in this case, half a bagel for breakfast can be considered, on some level, an emergency of sorts. If I had had any idea you were going to be so excitable, I would have used a different word. Why aren’t you talking to David every day? When are you coming home? We should be planning your wedding! WHAT IS GOING ON?”
“I am very busy, Auntie Geraldine,” Lala spat through clenched teeth. “Filming is very exhausting. I had to write a new scene.”
It was clear to Lala from Geraldine’s facial reaction that her aunt thought she was kidding. Unsure what else to say in her inadequate defense, Lala waited for Geraldine’s verbal reaction to her barrage of bullshit.
“One scene?” Geraldine finally said.
“It was a complicated scene,” Lala sniffed.
I guess I don’t need to add that I had a writing partner who worked on it with me . . .
“I was just about to see if David is available to Skype when I was shanghaied by your exaggerated and misleading subject line.”
“Good!” Geraldine said. “You call him right now!”
“I will,” Lala said. “I’ll do it ’cause I wanna do it. Not because you told me too.”
Geraldine gave the screen an okay, now you have just got to be kidding look.
Yeeeaaahhh, that was pretty ridiculous of me, Lala thought.
Geraldine hoisted up Petunia, who had fallen asleep, by her armpits and wagged the beagle, who did not wake up, at the screen. “Tell mama we are watching her. Tell her that we will no longer put up with her crap. Tell her we will call her on her crap, non-stop. Right, my sweet little Petunia?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lala grumbled. “Hug them all for me, okay? And you and Monty hug each other from me, ’kay?”
“Will do!” Geraldine said with smug confidence and exaggerated cheerfulness and assurance that she had won the argument she instigated. “Love you!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lala said.
She clicked off the connection and sunk back on the couch.
Merde, she thought. I really miss David. And I also really need to expand my vocabulary of French swear words.
Lala violently shook her head in an attempt to stop herself from thinking too much before she acted.
Great, she thought. Now I just feel like I’m going to barf.
She typed a short e-mail to David and hit “Send” before she had a chance to second-guess herself. Then she reread it in her Sent folder and cringed because there were tw
o typos. Before she had much time to silently berate herself for not proofreading, a dinging sound loudly requested her presence in the Skype interchange.
When Lala saw David sitting at the desk in his apartment at UC Davis, she burst into tears. He was wearing the sport coat she had bought him when they took a short vacation to Ventura.
“What’s wrong?” David asked. “Lala, darling, why are you crying?”
“I love you so much and I miss you so much and I’m really busy with the film, and I can’t really do math when time is involved because it’s not a ten-based system, and I keep getting confused about the difference between California and France, and I’ve also been on set just about every day, and when I’m not on set I’ve been walking all around Paris because it’s so beautiful, and I wish you were here to see it all with me . . .”
And you’re going to die one day, she thought. And I just don’t think I could bear that . . .
“. . . and there are feral cats in the garden behind the building where I’m living and I have to make them a managed colony and at least one of them is probably tame—”
“You and the cat looked at each other, didn’t you?” David asked.
“Yup,” Lala said. “Gimme a minute, okay?”
She buried her face in the blanket next to her on the couch and gasped and groaned and finally forced herself to stop crying. She popped her head back up and smiled weakly at David.
“That took longer than I expected,” she said. “David, it’s still afternoon there, yes? Can you maybe check if any of your colleagues there know any rescuers in Paris? I need humane traps, and I need to get all the cats fixed.”
“Absolutely,” David said. “I’ll get the information, sweetheart. Please try not to be so sad, okay? I’m sure someone here has a contact in Paris. I know you’ll get that tame cat inside and I know you’ll find her a wonderful home. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Lala looked at David sitting there with that sweet, guileless face of his. She remembered how happy he was when she ducked into that small store because she had seen that gorgeous jacket in the window. She remembered walking back to the hotel in Ventura with David and their then four dogs, because her precious Yootza was still alive. She remembered—vividly, as though she had been transported back in time and to another continent—ripping each other’s clothes off and having spectacular sex right after they had waited with ever growing impatience for the dogs to settle down in their beds and fall asleep because Lala had a “hard time really letting loose in the eros department when the beasts are conscious in the same room and are often given to staring at us. Unblinkingly staring at us, which is especially creepy.”
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