Standing Room Only

by Heidi Mastrogiovanni

  “Is it just me, or is their unbridled delight at girl-on-girl both adorable and irritating?” she asked Marie-Laure.

  “Not just you,” Marie-Laure said. “Both. Pas de question.”

  “God, this is so much fun,” Lala said. “But you know what’s missing?”

  “Clive?”

  Lala noticed Gérard responding to Marie-Laure’s uncensored enthusiasm for the British movie star with a quick flash of irritation. And she gave him credit for just as quickly changing his expression into a classic Casanova’s “I’m up for any permutation” stance.

  “Well, sure, Clive’s adorable, but I was thinking of my fiancé . . .”

  . . . to-be-my-fiancé?, Lala thought.

  “David,” Lala said. “My fiancé. Full stop. If he’ll still have me. Please forgive me. I’ve got to be somewhere.”

  “You are somewhere,” Gérard said. He winked at Lala and looked very pleased with himself.

  Oh, and how bilingually clever do we imagine we are? Lala thought. Stay cocky, mon ami. And, no, I just can’t entirely stop thinking about your penis.

  Lala smiled at Gérard and patted his wet shoulder with her dripping hand. She realized that she wasn’t being very successful in keeping her smile or her pat from seeping over into the realm of the patronizing. And so she reconciled herself to the near certainty that her next words would also be rather condescending.

  “Somewhere else,” she said. “Vite, vite.”

  It was agreed, reluctantly by Lala and only after extensive lecturing by everyone except Pierre, who had given up trying to “persuade this woman of anything because she is an American and they are notoriously stubborn,” that it was far too late and Lala was far too drunk to drive back to Paris that night, and she would just have to wait until the morning.

  “And, no, there won’t be any trains running at this hour, Lala,” Pierre had huffed on his way to his bedroom. “This is France. We aren’t as obsessive as you Americans are. We’re not a twenty-four-hour society, merci beaucoup.”

  Clearly Lala had whined the question, “But can’t I catch a traaaaiiiiiin?” once too often for Pierre’s liking.

  Lala marched up the stairs in a snit of drunken petulance. If Lala’s beloved mother was watching her daughter from Heaven, she would at least have been comforted to note that her sometimes bossy child was making a point of putting her feet down very gently as she stomped on the steps, and was whispering her outrage rather than shouting it so as to “not wake your lovely grand-mère, Gérard, though if she were awake, I feel sure that wonderful and inspiring lady would agree with me that love is patient, love is kind and it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, and that those words especially apply to driving to Charles de Gaulle in the middle of the night.”

  Lala took a hot shower when she got back to her room, and for a minute she felt entirely confident that she had sobered up enough to drive. She was going to march right back downstairs, declare her conviction to everyone, and demand that they get her car out of the multi-car garage that was somewhere on the property, right after she took a tiny little five-minute cat nap.

  When she next opened her eyes, the glass in the windows was covered with torrential rain. She had been sleeping naked on her stomach the whole night and well into and beyond the morning. Lala hadn’t managed to dry her wet hair or even free it from the towel turban she had created.

  She lifted her throbbing head and her bloodshot eyes saw that a large breakfast tray had been set up next to her bed. She smelled the tantalizing aroma of especially fragrant coffee.

  I think I need to barf, she thought.

  She put her head back down on the bed and waited for the moment to pass, which it thankfully eventually did. While she was trying not to have to vomit, Lala silently prayed that it had not been Gérard who had delivered the food to her room, not because she was, in principle, opposed to him seeing her naked, as her willing participation in the skinny dipping had clearly substantiated, but because she felt confident that splayed on a bed with her limbs twisted in unnatural directions was probably not a staging that would be showing her at her best.

  As soon as she was sure she wasn’t going to be sick, Lala, without stopping to think that it might be a bad idea given the possibly tentative calming of her hangover, ate the scrambled eggs and the flaky, buttery croissant (to which she paused to add apricot confiture) and the sautéed new potatoes, and chugged all the coffee straight from the pot because pouring it into a cup seemed as unnecessary a step as transferring Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond from the container to a bowl before she ate it all while watching yet another episode of an irresistibly addictive television show.

  Lala sat straight up after swallowing the last mouthful and scrunched her lips upward in an expression of nervous anticipation. After three very loud burps, she felt that maybe her future held respite rather than disaster, and she decided she was willing to risk standing. She tottered upward and stood swaying for several moments.

  Okay, I think I’m good.

  She tottered to the bathroom and peered in the mirror.

  Oh. Well. Okay. Maybe those creases will eventually come out of my face.

  Lala unwrapped the terrycloth from her head. Her still-damp hair, which had essentially been tightly trapped in an impromptu steam room for hours, was crimped and crinkled in some sections and dreadfully flat and lifeless in others. It also smelled vaguely of mold.

  The shower she took that rainy day in that exquisite estate in that lovely, world-famous town outside the French capital lasted forty-five minutes. When Lala would speak of it in the future, she would describe it as “the closest I have ever come to communing with the divine.”

  She held the blow dryer to her strands until they were bone dry. Then Lala quickly dressed, quickly packed up her belongings, and ran down the stairs carrying the tray with her. She found Gérard and Marie-Laure and Arlette and Étienne in the kitchen, where they had just finished having lunch. All the other guests had already headed home.

  “I had a wonderful time!” Lala said. “Thank you so much for everything. You must promise me that you will come stay with us in Manhattan Beach so I can reciprocate. I don’t mean to be abrupt, but I’m in a terrible hurry, as I suspect I may have explained, repeatedly and in a slurring voice, last night. Breakfast was delicious! Thank you so much! Gérard, you weren’t the one who brought it up to my room, were you?”

  Lala’s car, as it happened, was already waiting for her in the circular driveway, having been brought out of the garage by her new life coach, Arlette. The four of them walked Lala outside, each one brandishing a large umbrella against the still pouring rain. Gérard put Lala’s bag in the backseat. Lala got in the driver’s seat and buckled her seatbelt.

  “Godspeed, my lovely girl,” Arlette whispered to Lala. She kissed her on both cheeks. “No matter what the outcome, please remember that I am proud of you for doing this.” Lala grasped her hand and squeezed it.

  “I think there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t have the courage to do this if I hadn’t met you,” she said.

  “Then I’m especially glad we met,” Arlette said.

  Lala closed the door and rolled down the window. Gérard leaned in and caressed her cheek with his palm for a moment. As suddenly as Lala had felt the pressure of his hand on her face, it was gone. She blinked and shook her head imperceptibly and focused on not blushing.

  “You will be okay driving back?” Gérard asked.

  “Of course!” Lala said. “I’m very good on freeways. Highways. Motorways. Whatever the fuck y’all call them.”

  Lala’s hands had been clenched in white-knuckled terror for so long, she was starting to suspect that arthritis might be the permanent result of her misguided bravado.

  She had just pulled into a rest stop at the side of the . . . she still didn’t know what it was actually cal
led, so she kept thinking of it as a freeway, but in a futile attempt at distraction from the hell she had inflicted on herself, she was thinking of the route in the literal French translation of free and way, manières libres, which had been good for exactly one silent grunt of a chuckle as she tried to stay calm while maneuvering along the road with semi-trucks and high-class automobiles that were giving no adjustment to their driving because of the torrents of rain all around them.

  Lala sat in the parking lot of the rest stop. The lights of the small snack shop behind the gas pumps read as blurry and melting through the water cascading down the car. Lala stretched her stiff fingers over and over again.

  I’m not a good driver in sunshine, she thought. She shook her head and was surprised to find herself beginning to hum The Wedding March. God, I really have to pee.

  Lala threw the door open and ran into the store. It wasn’t much of a distance, but she was soaked by the time she got inside. She blinked to adjust to the bright lights. A woman was standing behind the counter with her back to the door. She was reading a magazine. Lala walked up to the counter. She assumed the woman must have heard the door open and close. She assumed the woman must have felt the increasingly irritated energy of Lala’s unacknowledged presence. The woman did not, however, turn around or take her eyes off the magazine.

  Oh for fuck’s sake, Lala thought.

  “Excusez-moi?” she said.

  The woman took a full beat to even lift her head, let alone turn around, which took another full count of ten.

  Omigod! Lala thought when she finally saw the woman’s face! It’s the dreaded daughter! What the fuck is her name again?

  “Madame Pettt-eeeettttt-BOWWWNNN,” the woman sneered with a pronounced look of aggressive disappointment.

  Omigod, no, Lala thought. No, no, I do not have the energy to deal with this . . .

  “Oh, gosh, please, call me Lala,” Lala said.

  “Nice to see you again, LaLAAAAA,” the woman said, with no hint of pleasure in her voice or face.

  Oh god, Lala thought. No. That’s almost worse.

  “Bathroom?” she begged.

  The woman made a quick jerking motion with her head toward a short hallway in the middle of the far wall. Lala ran in that direction, yanked the door open, scooted inside the bathroom, and bolted the door behind her like one being pursued by a mythical beast.

  What is her damn name? she thought.

  Lala came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, after soaking her hands in hot water, which made them feel much better. She smiled at the woman and tried to sound gracious.

  “How’s your dear papa?”

  “My pa-PAAAA?” the woman said. “Oh, he is very fine, thank you. He was very much enjoying working on the movie for which you hired him, and he is now an actor and he is very happy.”

  “That’s nice,” Lala said uncertainly. The woman’s clear disdain was making her increasingly nervous.

  “He is fine, my pa-PAAAA,” the woman repeated. “I, however, am not.”

  “Oh,” Lala said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I realize that dashing out right now without another word would be very rude, even in the face of her appreciable lack of courtesy, Lala thought. That’s not the issue. The issue is, do I care?

  “Yes, well, my FATHERRRR has insisted that I work here, you see, since I no longer have a building to manage for him because now that building is YOURRRR building.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Lala said.

  “And now he says I must learn some proper VAAAAALUES, and I must work here because it is owned by a friend of his, and my father got me this job so I can LEARRRRRN.”

  I may be having a mild stroke, Lala thought. She realized that she had subconsciously decided to start moving herself, millimeter by millimeter, toward the urgent but distant promise of the exit.

  “My father is now only paying for my rent and my credit card bills. Everything else, I must pay for with what I earn here, La-LAAAAA.”

  Lala winced at the sound of her name, then twitched, and then jerked her head back involuntarily as though to get her ears as far away as possible. She almost hit the base of her skull against a rack with magnifying eyeglasses on it that she had somehow moved herself dangerously close to.

  “And what I earn here,” the woman said, “is a pittance.”

  She does speak English very well, Lala thought. “Pittance.” You don’t hear that every day in Manhattan Beach. What is her name? This is going to drive me nuts . . . Why isn’t she wearing a name tag? Isn’t that the law, or something? Maybe not in France . . .

  “Right, well, okay,” Lala said. “Good luck, then.”

  And with that, Lala bolted for the door. And skidded to a stop just before she opened it.

  “Umm . . . what is this called?” she asked, and gestured outside.

  “This?” the woman repeated with unfettered disdain. “Rain?”

  “The road? What is a big road, a highway, freeway . . . What is it called in French?”

  “Ohhh,” the woman groaned as if she had been inconvenienced and insulted beyond the outermost boundaries of civilization. “L’autoroute?”

  “Omigosh, of course,” Lala said, and actually slapped her forehead, just in case her words weren’t enough to indicate her exasperation with how dense she had been.

  And, Lala thought, I think I may be starting to get subtext, because the clear unspoken message that last word she spat at me is that I am, in her estimation, a complete idiot.

  Lala smiled at the woman, waved good-bye, and ran out into the rain. She lunged for the door to her car and slid inside, even more soaked than she had been when she had entered the store.

  Actually, I’m a bit pipped at my Gallic Heartthrob, Lala thought. I don’t know why Gérard didn’t just tell me it’s an autoroute before I drove away. It might have brought me some measure of, well, if not peace, then at least closure, during this shit show of a journey.

  And then Lala suddenly remembered something because she hadn’t been trying to remember it for the past few minutes since her focus had been distracted by the French word for “freeway,” and she once again slapped her forehead in a universal gesture of regret and recrimination.

  “Celestine! Of course! Her name is Celestine!”

  That was going to drive me nuts all the way to Paris, Lala thought as she started the car up again and shifted it into gear. Okay, let’s get this shit show of a journey back on the road, shall we?

  There’s No Place Like Home(s)

  Lala was still not so delirious that she was unable to realize that she was nearly delirious with exhaustion. Unfortunately, there was no time to waste and thus no time to rest.

  She had gotten back to her apartment after hours of tense driving, swearing to herself as she parked the car that she would not only never again drive on an autoroute of any kind, domestic or foreign, she would, in fact, never again get behind the wheel of a car as a driver. Not on side streets in Los Angeles. Not on country lanes. Not while playing video games with the many adopted grandnieces and grandnephews she looked forward to having.

  I swear, she said to herself as she trudged up the stairs to her apartment, I will never ever ever ever ever again turn the ignition key to a motorized vehicle. Never. Fuck that noise. I fucking hate driving.

  The first thing she did when she got inside her apartment was call Kenny and ask him to please come to her apartment and please bring Minou so she could say “Good-bye for now.”

  Kenny rushed upstairs. He had Minou cradled in his arms. The cat was sound asleep. Lala could see how much they loved each other. She felt happily teary.

  “Look at you two,” she sighed.

  “How was your weekend? Did you actually make it there?” Kenny asked.

  “I actually did. And it was a very enlightening time. Listen, would you do me a h
uge favor and promise you’ll come to LA for my wedding, if I have one?”

  Lala hugged Kenny and squished Minou between them as she did. Kenny started to say something.

  “Non, non, mon cher, pas maintenant,” Lala said. “I’ll explain all via a joyous e-mail from California, if I’m lucky. Now, scoot! I love you both, and I’m in a big hurry!”

  Lala’s next call was to Clive.

  “How are you?” he asked. “How was the party?”

  “Enlightening. Listen, I know how irritating unsolicited advice can be, but if I were you, the moment that Matthew yells ‘That’s a wrap!’ I would get on a plane to Stratford, and I would find Tara, and I would tell her that she’s the love of my life, and I would do whatever I needed to do to get her back. And then I would marry her, if she would still have me. And then you must bring her to my wedding. If I’m lucky enough to have one.”

  “What are you—”

  “Clive, my dear boyfriend in an alternate universe, I’m sorry to dictate and run, but I’m in a mad hurry. I’ll e-mail you as soon as I have some news, good or otherwise, oh please, universe, let it be good.”

  As Lala was throwing a few essential things into a carry-on bag, there was an urgent knocking on her door. She heard a familiar voice, always much loved and currently rather feared, despite Lala’s immediate and obedient plans to change her life completely.

  “Lala!” Geraldine yelled through the door as she continued to pound on it, “are you in there? You better be in there and you better open up, right now!”

  Lala ran to the door and threw it open.

  “What are you doing here?”