“Is there a price point we should be respectful of?”
“Well, here’s the thing,” Lala said. “Whatever I spend, the four of us are going to double that amount and use it to start a foundation that brings senior shelter animals to assisted living facilities and to group homes for kids, so the cats and dogs can spend their golden years staying with elderly people and young people. It’s a natural match, and we’re going to provide the coordination and support needed to make it a viable program around the country. We’ve got a commitment for matching funds from several companies and public figures, including absolutely adorable Clive Ellis, who is starring in the movie version of my novel, Dressed Like a Lady, Drinks Like a Pig, and also I think I didn’t time my inhalations correctly and I’m running out of breath . . .”
Lala gasped for air and looked over nervously at Olivia, who was smiling. She made a circular waving motion with her right hand.
“It’s okay, keep going,” she said. “We’ll edit the blips.”
“Umm, right,” Lala said. “So, I guess the answer is, the higher the price, the better. And I’ve probably watched all the episodes of the show at least once, so I do know that there are some ridiculously high-priced dresses here. I mean, seriously, who needs to spend thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on a dress?”
Lala noticed that Olivia was frowning at her.
“That’s not going to make it into the final cut, is it?” Lala asked.
“No,” Olivia said. “Not a chance. Let’s get you into the dressing room.”
Olivia and the camera operators followed Lala as Julie led her through the showroom and down a hallway to a fairly small dressing room. Only one of the camera operators, a woman, joined them inside the room, with the other camera operators waiting in the large anteroom with several dressing rooms off it outside Lala’s room.
Julie motioned for Lala to sit, and sat down next to her.
“Tell me about your fiancé, Lala,” Julie said.
“Oh, David is absolutely wonderful,” Lala began.
Uh oh, Lala thought. I . . . I think I’m going to . . .
Lala looked straight into the camera, as though she wanted to speak to Terrence.
“My first husband died. He was absolutely wonderful, too. I miss him all the time. He really wanted me to find love again.”
“I’m sorry,” Olivia whispered. “That was lovely, Lala, and very touching, but do you think we can do it again without you looking into the camera?”
Again? Lala thought. Oh, no. I can’t recreate—
Julie took Lala’s hand in hers and drew Lala’s focus back to her.
“Lala, I understand this is going to be your second marriage?”
“Yes,” Lala said, thinking about David and Terrence and how lucky she was much more than trying to act like she was thinking about David and Terrence and how lucky she was.
Lala told Julie about how Terrence had been diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer and how he had died less than six months after. She told Julie about how much love and care their family and friends gave them when Terrence was sick and after Terrence died. She told Julie how painful and awful it had been to miss Terrence as much as she did, and how time had helped ease the anguish. She told Julie about meeting David and being engaged-to-be-engaged to him at first and about how terrified she was that David would die before she did and she would be widowed again, and she didn’t think she could survive that much pain twice, but she had decided that being married to David was worth any risk.
And then she showed Julie a picture of her with Terrence, one that had been taken when she first met him and that she had scanned onto her phone and put in her laptop so that it would always be near her. It was a shot of them standing by the stage of the Shakespeare in the Park theatre in Central Park on a gorgeous fall day in New York. And then she showed Julie a picture of her with David. They were walking along the boardwalk in Santa Monica. And then she told Julie about how she met Terrence and how she met David, leaving out the part where she slept with both of the men on the first night she met them, because she figured that might be a bit much for a basic cable channel.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Olivia said, “we have to stop for a second. I think the mic on the camera picked up the operator crying. And if it didn’t catch her crying, it probably caught me crying. That was great, Lala. Let’s take a break.”
“That was kind of a long speech, huh?” Lala said. Olivia come over and hugged her.
“Oh, goodness, yes, it was much too long. We’ll keep maybe one-fifteenth of it. But it was lovely. It really was.”
“I am NOT coming out!” Lala yelled.
That was the fifth time that afternoon that she had spoken those exact words.
“Can I just announce my subtext to my entourage?” she asked Olivia. “You can edit it out, right?”
“Go to town,” Olivia said.
“I am NOT coming out because I am getting very sick of all of you and your bossy bullshit!”
“Whoa, yeah!” Olivia said, grinning. “We might keep that in. Bleeped of course.”
“Cool!” Lala said.
Lala was still in the dressing room. Geraldine and Brenda and Helene had moved from their chairs in the main showroom and were now sitting in the smaller anteroom outside the dressing room.
Lala’s entourage had committed one of the cardinal sins of the show by wandering around the salon to pick out their own selections of dresses for Lala to try on. They had even found their way into the hallowed stockroom that housed the hidden treasures of Kleinfeld, a place of legend into which no civilian was meant to tread and from which no lay person could emerge unaffected. This trespass was met with extreme irritation on the part of Lala’s bridal consultant and extreme satisfaction on the part of the producer of Lala’s segment.
Julie had reluctantly agreed to bring the armfuls of dresses that Geraldine and Brenda and Helene had picked out for Lala to her dressing room.
Lala had hated all of them on their hangers. She agreed to try them on only because Julie told her it would “make for good TV.” From outside the door, Geraldine and Brenda and Helene had gotten into the annoying habit of chanting, with growing determination, “Show us the dress! Show us the dress! Show us the dress!”
And each time the chanting began and crescendoed, Lala announced that she would not be coming out of the dressing room.
“No! You can see it when the episode airs! Unless I can bribe someone to delete all this misguided fashion mishegoss.”
Lala was in a sweeping ballgown. She looked in danger of being suffocated, and ultimately absorbed into and disappearing beneath the folds of fabric.
“I look like I’m in a third-rate bus-and-truck tour of Gone With the Wind,” she said.
Lala heard giggling from outside the dressing room, and she was instantly suspicious and on guard.
“We don’t care if you come out or not!” she heard her aunt crow.
“We’re drinking champagne out here!” she heard her best friend say.
Lala grabbed the bountiful skirt of the dress she had on and lifted it up so that she wouldn’t trip and fall on her face. She threw open the door of the dressing room and stomped out, and immediately registered that there were no champagne glasses and no champagne bottles and no one was imbibing.
“SUCKA!” Brenda yelled.
“But some champagne would be lovely,” Geraldine jumped in to say. “Hair of the dog and all that.”
“Oh my god, Lala, that dress looks terrible on you,” Helene groaned. “And I’m the one who picked it out. You are submerged in that much fabric. And it looks like your waist has literally been surgically removed. I’m intentionally using ‘literally’ incorrectly to highlight my point about your waist having disappeared.”
“Okay, that’s it,” Julie said. “Lala, get ba
ck in the dressing room. You three . . .”
She pointed an accusing and furious finger at Lala’s entourage.
“You three stay right there. I am going shopping now. Alone.”
Julie strode away with her head held especially high and her shoulders especially squared, much as a 1940s movie star might stride into battle in a classic film. Lala saw her aunt raise her eyebrows in amusement and, as she walked back to the dressing room and shut the door behind her, heard the three women giggling like schoolgirls herded outside the principal’s office for an amusing infraction that they knew would not result in any permanent blot on their records.
Julie knocked on the dressing room door after not quite a quarter of an hour and carried in three dresses. She hung them up, and Lala studied them.
She liked them all, and her first impression was that she liked them all very much, actually. One of them, she realized with increasing confidence, she loved.
“That one,” she said, pointing at the dress hanging in the middle.
Julie nodded and smiled.
“I had a feeling it would be that one.”
Julie helped Lala into the dress. She clipped the back of it so that the sample size would fit Lala. Lala looked in the mirror. The dress was off-the-shoulder, with sleeves that ended just below her elbows. The material was a very soft and comfortable lace. The dress was tightly-fitted on top and them flowed outward at Lala’s hips. The sample size was much too long for her, a fact which caused Lala no concern at all because she had watched endless examples of the magic created by the alterations department at Kleinfeld. She was instantly enchanted.
“We weren’t kidding about the champagne,” Geraldine yelled from outside the door. Lala and Julie rolled their eyes in unified bemusement. Lala spun around to take a look at the back view of the dress.
“It looks like I have a waist,” Lala whispered.
“That color is called ‘champagne’,” Julie told Lala.
“That,” Lala said, “is a clear sign from the universe.”
Lala and Julie walked out of the dressing room. Geraldine and Brenda and Helene gasped.
“Turn around,” Geraldine ordered. Lala did. The women all uttered an extended “Ohhhh” that covered varying octaves.
“You better love it. Do you love it?” Brenda asked. Lala nodded and shrugged her shoulders in joyous disbelief.
“That’s the one,” Helene agreed.
“Yup,” Geraldine said. “You don’t need to try on any others.”
“Yup,” Brenda said.
“Done. Ring it up and wrap it up. Let’s start drinking,” Geraldine said.
“Yup,” Brenda and Helene said.
“Uh oh,” Lala said. She turned to Olivia, who was standing next to one of the camera operators and was beaming. “Should we reshoot that? It’s my first dress that I showed them. It shouldn’t go this smoothly, should it? I mean, for purposes of storytelling ’n’ conflict ’n’ stuff?”
Olivia shook her head and grinned. “That’s okay, we have a very good amount of conflict already. Julie, go ahead and ask the question.”
“Lala,” Julie said, “are you saying yes to the dress?”
Lala lifted her arms up over her head and yelled, “I am saying FUCK yes to the dress!”
She thrust her hands downward and covered her filthy mouth and mumbled, “Oh shit, should we do that over again?” and everyone started laughing.
“Nah,” Olivia chortled. “We’ll bleep it. It’ll be a hoot. Okay, people that is a wrap! Who’s popping the champagne?”
“Yes!” Geraldine said. “We are parched over here, and we are saying YES to the bubbly!”
She Does And He Does And They Do
The courtyard of the fourplex where Lala and David and Geraldine and Monty lived had a bit of the air of a meeting at the United Nations, without the polyglot quality, since the lingua franca of the festive day was unabashedly English. Despite that monolingualism, many air miles/kilometers crossing the Atlantic and the Great American Continent had in fact been logged by guests at the wedding.
Kenny and Atticus and Kenny’s grandfather had arrived from France a few days earlier. Matthew had flown in for the day from the location of the next movie he was directing. Clive and his girlfriend Tara—the love of his life who agreed to forgive him when he surprised her at the Shakespeare Theatre in England and said she would be willing to “take things very slowly and you better not fuck it up again, Buster”—were there. The wonderful French veterinarians who were part of the feral cat coalition that Lala had helped to establish with Kenny and that now had six maintained feral colonies in several neighborhoods in Paris had come to celebrate. Gérard and Marie-Laure and Gérard’s grandmother and step-grandfather were there, having arrived in the U.S. two weeks before to tour up and down the splendid California coast and check out the rival vineyards of the Golden State.
Local guests included their neighbors Craig and Stephanie and their baby, along with Thomas the Salman Rushdie twin and his girlfriend, and Lala’s producing partners, Zoe and Eliza. David’s grown sons had come from San Diego and Long Island, respectively and, at the rehearsal dinner the night before, Lala had initiated her not-very-discreet project to get them matched up with her young partners.
“YOU! You four MUST sit next to each other!” she had loudly commanded. “Talk! Get to know each other! Flirt! I’m the bride! Do what I say!”
And now the wedding day had arrived, and everyone was enjoying a bountiful Happy Hour with a full bar and a wide array of vegan appetizers before the ceremony. Had Lala been looking out over the railing of the balcony outside her apartment, she would have seen Zoe and Eliza and Ben and Warren chatting animatedly together, and she would have been very pleased and proud of her yenta skills.
David and his best man Monty, along with Brenda’s husband Frank and Helene’s boyfriend Clark, were standing up front at the pergola, where the judge, who had gone to Wesleyan with Lala and who had been a delightful rediscovery via the wonders of social media after he and Lala had lost touch post-college, would be uniting the bride and groom in matrimony. David kept checking his watch nervously, as did Monty, both men wanting to get to their places with several minutes to spare.
They needn’t have worried about the hour. It was Ides of March, and Lala Pettibone was not going to be on time . . .
Upstairs in Lala’s bedroom, her trio of attendants, Geraldine, Brenda, and Helene, were with the bride. Joining them for the preparations were Lala and David’s four-legged children, who now numbered five.
As soon as Lala got back from picking out her wedding dress in New York City, she told David she was ready to adopt again. They went to Dogs of Love and adopted a brother-and-sister Chihuahua pair who had been abandoned by the family of an old woman who died. The dogs were estimated to be around 15 or 16 years old, and they each weighed no more than three pounds. Lala lost her mind when she met them.
“I . . . I . . . I love them so much already, I can barely breathe.” She turned to David and grabbed both his hands in a desperate plea. “David, I’m going to want to pick them up and hold them and kiss them all the time. Please keep an eye on me so I don’t go overboard. This will, as I know you are already imagining, require your constant vigilance.”
They had come with the names Squeaky Boy and Squeaky Girl, which Lala deemed “so wrong, they’re right,” and it was decided by their new mama and papa that the monikers the precious seniors had known all their lives would of course be retained. Lala did come up with the idea of adding their own special flair to the new family members’ names by referring to the dogs, at all times, as the Squeaky Boy and the Squeaky Girl.
“At all times?” David had asked when she made the pronouncement at the shelter.
“It’s like with the Bronx,” Lala told him. “No one says, ‘I’m going to Bronx.’ No one. Ever. It’s always got
a definite article, right? Trust me, this will be exactly the same thing.”
The five dogs were dressed in formal wear for the ceremony and were all asleep in their beds. They would all be escorted down the aisle by Brenda and Helene, who would enter for the ceremony first, and then Geraldine would escort her beloved adopted niece to the pergola.
There would be no music accompanying Lala and Geraldine down the aisle. Instead, the wedding invitations had specified that the guests were requested to please offer a version of the Wedding March by either snapping their fingers to the timeless tune or clapping out the rhythm, which Lala thought would be a “freakin’ hoot and would set the tone for the day very nicely,” and which Geraldine had deemed, while giggling, “the silliest fucking idea I have heard since that crap you pulled about being ‘engaged-to-be-engaged’ when you were out of your fucking mind.”
Lala’s hair, as coiffed by Geraldine, looked beautiful. Geraldine had made it softly wavy and had gathered it in a gentle updo. Brenda was responsible for Lala’s make-up, and had done a gorgeous job of riding that fine line between simple and fussy.
The three attendants’ dresses had also been selected on their trip to New York, with the cost also being doubled as donations to the new animal welfare foundation. They were matching short, navy cocktail dresses. Geraldine had spied them the moment the four women had entered the designer dresses department at Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square.
“We’re wearing those,” she announced. And then she slowly turned her head to peer at Lala. “Anyone want to argue with me?”
“Not I,” said Lala. And she didn’t regret abdicating any decision-making responsibility then, and certainly not on the day of the wedding, because the dresses looked breathtaking on her attendants.
“You all look so beautiful,” Lala sighed with infinite contentment.
“And as beautiful as our dresses may be,” Helene said, “they will pale in comparison to yours.”
Indeed, the only thing left to do before they made their elegant way to the ceremony, was to get Lala into her wedding gown.
Standing Room Only Page 28