Devil's Food

by Janice Weber

  Ward’s wide, grotesque smile returned. After Ross had gone, she had a few words with Zoltan. Then she left Diavolina.

  The next morning, a limousine pulled up to a posh Los Angeles hotel. Philippa’s manager hopped out of the backseat and phoned Emily from the lobby. “Ready, Phil?” he asked, anxiously studying his cravat in the smoked mirror. Perhaps he had knotted it a centimeter too tight; instead of camouflaging the extra folds in his neck, the tie created a half-inch bulge along its upper perimeter. “I don’t want to be late for this one.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Emily got to the lobby as Simon was retying his fifth knot. He appraised her hot-pink-and-orange pantsuit as she walked toward him. “Not bad,” he said, studying the deep V-neck. “I see you’re finally getting some business clothes into your wardrobe.” He inspected her face. “Could have worn your false eyelashes, though. You look a little washed out.” He took her elbow. “Let’s go. Why the hell are you staying in a hotel? What happened to your apartment?”

  “A friend’s using it,” Emily lied, ducking into the limousine.

  “Ass first, Phil! Lead with the ass, not the nose! Don’t you ever listen to me?” Simon dove in after her. As the car pulled away, he lit a cigarette. “First of all, let me get something off my chest. Disappear like that ever again and we’re finished. You left me holding the bag with the entire NYPD. They accused me of every fucking crime in the book. I had nothing to do with that faggot who offed himself, and everyone knows it.”

  “They let you go, didn’t they?”

  “Shut up! I can’t have talent disappearing into the woodwork like a termite! If you hadn’t called in, this meeting never would have happened. And you’d be unemployed for another six months. Where the hell were you hiding, anyway?”

  “In the country. So who’s this Czech producer? What’s he got in mind?”

  “That’s what breakfast is all about, darling. His office was very coy on the phone. I got no details whatsoever.”

  Emily’s stomach gently turned. “You’ve never met him before? How do you know he’s not going to pull a gun on me and blow my brains out?”

  Simon looked at her in surprise. “Why should he do that, Phil? Then no one makes any money. Put some rouge on, would you?” As Emily was reddening her cheeks, he said, “And get the name straight. Vitzkewicz. It’s a tongue twister. Mr. Vitz-ke-wicz. I don’t want you mushing it up after a few Manhattans like you did last time. And don’t sit in his lap unless he invites you. You weigh five times as much as Shirley Temple.”

  Emily snapped the rouge case shut. Her enormous blond wig was already beginning to melt brain tissue. “Any more hot tips?”

  “No. Just let me do the talking.” Simon spent the rest of the journey jabbering a bizarre tide of molasses, arsenic, and baloney into the mobile phone. When he hung up and began poufing his hair, Emily knew they were almost at the restaurant. “Best behavior, now,” Simon instructed as the chauffeur slowed to a halt. “Don’t order anything more than two inches long. I don’t need you slurping noodles all over the tablecloth like you did last time. And keep your knees together when you get out of the limo! People are watching!” He sprang from the backseat to the sidewalk. Grandly extending his arm, he guided Emily into the light of day.

  The decor at Luco’s was Tinseltown Buddhist, that is, bare white walls, Bauhaus chairs, sexually explicit flowers, and lots of cutesy angles. Emily and Simon cut quite a swath through the dining room, kissing affectionate strangers who called their names. The maître d’finally seated them at a balcony table with a regal view of the dining room. Awaiting their mimosas, Simon reeled off the birth names, sexual orientation, and net worth of the people they had just embraced. “Where the hell is Witcovich?” he snarled after scarifying nearly everyone in sight. “Waiting more than ten minutes is an insult.”

  A waiter came their way carrying what looked like a small plastic pillow. “Good morning. My name is Franco. I’ve been asked to deliver this,” he said, placing it on the tablecloth. “The other party couldn’t stay.”

  “What other party?” Simon asked, screwing around in his chair: too late.

  Franco paused until he had regained Simon’s full attention. “There’s a message. Filming begins in two weeks. The other party is looking forward to working with Miss Banks.” He smiled at Emily. She turned superciliously away; the man’s mouth reminded her of Guy’s.

  “Great. Thank you,” Simon grunted, slipping him fifty dollars. “You wouldn’t be able to give me a visual on the other party, would you?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Franco had obviously collected a higher tip therefrom. “But she had diamonds as big as her eyes.”

  “She?” Emily said after the fellow had left. “I thought Vitzkewicz was a man.”

  “Of course it’s a man,” Simon snapped. “Ever hear of delivery girls?” He stared at the package on the table. “Look at that wrapping job. You’d think it was the Crown Jewels or something.” He thoughtfully swallowed most of his champagne and orange juice. “Usually I have to get them drunk and half laid before they even think of hiring you. This one just threw the script at us. Who’s complaining, though? Your price just tripled.”

  Emily frowned. “What kind of movie gets cranked up in two weeks?”

  “Phil, you know better than that. Actresses quit, get sick, get fired, gain weight....”

  “I don’t trust this.”

  “Baby, neither will I until the check clears. Meanwhile, drink up. You’re back in business. Once again, I’ve saved you from denture commercials.”

  “Come on! You haven’t even read the script! What if it’s a snuff movie?”

  “Then we’ll negotiate.” Simon paused as Franco recited a list of arty omelettes and flapjacks. “I don’t think we’re staying,” he said afterward. “Just bring the check.”

  “Wait a minute, I’m hungry!” Emily cried. “I came here all the way from New York to try the Lobster Baked Alaska.”

  Simon leaned over the table. “Listen, Phil, it’ll cost a fortune,” he whispered. “And Witkovish isn’t picking up the tab.” Simon magnanimously paid for their orange juice. They paraded back through the tables, exchanging rouge with effusive, emoting friends: Here the gods were rolling film and everyone wanted the lead. Out in the parking lot, Simon ripped off his cravat. “Whew! Quite an outhouse in there today. Where are you headed, Phil?”

  “Your office,” Emily said as Simon’s limousine rolled to the curb. “Thought I’d check on the old fan club.”

  “We’re going in opposite directions, then. You don’t mind taking a cab, do you, sugar?” Simon posed the question from the backseat of the limo.

  “What about the script?” Emily called as the vehicle pulled away.

  “Let me take a look first, baby. Call me tonight. I’ll let you know if it’s doable.” Simon’s dark window rolled shut.

  Fortunately Emily’s cab driver, an unemployed actor, knew the location of Simon’s office on Wilshire Boulevard. Throughout the ride, believing he was ferrying Philippa Banks across town, he talked about his upcoming auditions and his great manager and how driving a cab was just an interim job. The pathetic spiel sounded so much like poor dead Byron’s that Emily stopped listening; tales of failure, like tales of success, had a certain repellent monotony. Leaving a charitable tip, Emily entered a futuristic black building.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Banks,” greeted an armed guard.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Banks,” said an armed attendant at the elevator.

  “Hello, darling,” Emily responded to both. Her cheeks hurt from so much damn smiling. Her feet creaked with every step in these high heels. And people were watching her every second. How did Philippa stand it? “Beam me up to Simon’s, would you, sweetie? Thanks so much.”

  As the car ascended, Emily desperately tried to remember the name of the president of Philippa’s fan club. Angus? Anson? When the doors opened on the twentieth floor, she strode to the office at the end of
the hallway. In a way, it looked like Ross’s office on State Street, except this one had tackier furniture and more succulent plants.

  The receptionist made a flash reconnaissance of Emily’s hair, makeup, and pantsuit. “Hi, Miss Banks.”

  Were that Marjorie, Emily would be answering fifty questions about Vitzkewicz and filling in an expense report. “Hello, dear. May I have a word with the fan club?”

  “Sure.” Careful not to chip her nail polish, the girl pressed a button on the switchboard. “Aidan? You’ve got a visitor.”

  Within seconds a young man in a canary double-breasted suit, bulky or tight in all the correct places, appeared. A deep marigold necktie complimented his tan. Eight rings in his left ear did not quite distract attention from a mustache the size and shade of an industrial broom. “Banks!” he cried, taking her arm. “How’s your arm? You have some autographing to do for me.”

  Emily followed Aidan to his little office. “How’s business?”

  “Choke Hold is taking off. I told you it would.” He planted Emily in a chair and brought over a pile of photographs. “Start signing.”

  Emily hesitated. “What should I write?”

  “What you always do. No! Not with a ballpoint, Philippa! You know better than that!” Aidan gave her a purple felt-tip pen. “You got a great review in New York.”

  He handed her a scathing, insulting article skirting a fine line between parody and libel. Each sentence felt like one more twist of a tourniquet around her stomach. Finally Emily let it slip to the desk. “You call that a great review?” she whispered.

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “I don’t believe what I just read.”

  “Neither could Si. He couldn’t have bought better publicity. I just love this line.” Aidan snatched the article. “’Miss Banks acts with the dignity of a stegosaur caught in a tarpit.’ Gad! I have to take that guy out to lunch.”

  Emily began writing Philippa’s name on dozens of photos as Aidan brought her up to date on a particularly active fan club in Little Rock, where Philippa was considered to be one of America’s greatest dramatic actresses, right up there with Jayne Mansfield and Raquel Welch. “Would you be interested in leading their Thanksgiving parade this year?” Aidan asked. “They’d really appreciate it.”

  “Sure, what the hell.” She scribbled blithely on. “Any interesting letters come in recently?”

  “Just the usual proposals of marriage and requests for money. You now have official dues-paying fan clubs in eighteen federal penitentiaries.”

  “Would you mind running me a printout of everyone who’s written in the last six months?”

  “What for?”

  Shit! Shit! Emily squeezed her brain unmercifully, finally eking out a tiny, hard turd of an idea. “I went to my psychic last night,” she began.

  “Zilda?”

  “No, Carmen.” Oh crap, now she’d have to tell a second lie to explain the first! “I had a gift certificate. Anyway, Carmen told me that my future husband had written to you recently. I thought it would be interesting to read over your fan list and see if anything vibrated.”

  Finding no problem whatsoever with that story, Aidan soon had the computer churning page after page onto the floor. “I had no idea I was so popular,” Emily said.

  “Phil, you’re not popular at all. You’ve just got a great sales force.” Aidan laughed sort of sincerely. “I’ve been in the office at seven in the morning for the last three months.”

  As soon as possible, Emily left. She swung by her hotel, ditched Philippa’s wig and fluorescent pantsuit, and went to the airport. A Boston flight was just leaving; Emily eked aboard. Suddenly she was anonymous again. It felt odd not to have people stare at her; over the last few hours, she had grown quite accustomed to peripheral curiosity and admiration. Now she was just another drone? Blah. High over Colorado, as she was consoling herself with champagne, Emily took Aidan’s printout and began skimming through the names on his fan-club list. He had meticulously logged the date and content of each inquiry, as well as his response to it. Someone had sent Philippa a hand-crocheted bra? A trivet made out of bobby pins? Emily turned page after page, trying to picture the Jo-Lynns and Arnies from towns she had never hear of, in states containing the Mississippi River. Virgils, Nelsons, and Platos were easier to imagine since they wrote from prison. Many of them had asterisks beside their names. What did that mean? Emily turned to last page: Aha, they had proposed marriage to Philippa.

  She had skimmed two lines beyond Charles Moody when her subconscious tugged her back to his name. Something about it had seemed familiar. Her eyes traveled across the page, her stomach rolled: He occupied P.O. Box 274 at South Station. Charles Moody: how vapid, pseudonymous. No asterisk beside his name. According to Aidan’s records, Moody had received an announcement of the Choke Hold opening in New York. Emily let the printout drop to her lap. Had this person been there? If so, he hadn’t introduced himself. She read the postbox number again, not quite believing it. No need to panic; maybe someone named Moody had vacated the box a month ago and Slavomir had chanced to occupy it next. Things like that happened all the time. In the movies, anyway.

  No other names or addresses meant anything to her so Emily put the list away. Wait until Philippa heard that this trip had been totally unnecessary, that the role had been in the bag all along, and shooting began in two weeks. She had probably been up all night worrying about Emily’s portentous breakfast with Simon and The Producer. By now the poor thing was probably surfing between soap operas, drinking back-of-the-cabinet crap like Cinzano as she tried to figure out who could have slipped those four cherries into her drink the other night. That episode with the mad dentist had definitely shaken her up; ever since the attack, Philippa had been oddly subdued. Emily worried about that. Perhaps tucking her in the woods, alone with her thoughts, had not been such a great idea. Philippa never did well contemplating life, tortuously gleaning wisdom from the ether. She preferred to frame her fan mail.

  As an in-flight movie blurred across the screen, Emily wondered how Ross had entertained himself last night. All he’d ever confess to, of course, would be work. Had he taken another of those long midnight walks, careful to return by two o’clock, in case she called? Or had he just thought, The hell with it, and slept at Marjorie’s? Emily would never know; she had not had the courage to call. What would Marjorie be like in bed? Stenographer or nymphomaniac? And what would Ross be like with her? Emily chuckled acidly. Excellent, no doubt. He made love the way he drew buildings, elegantly, presciently: science advancing art. Marjorie was going to get a piece of that? Christ! She’d never let him go! Maybe Emily should corner her at the water fountain and convey a friendly female warning, whatever that was. Maybe she should smother Ross with kindness instead, make him feel so horrendously guilty that the sight of his secretary instantly squished any erection. And maybe she should just let it happen, swallow the consequences. God knew these things were fairly unavoidable, a sudden conflagration of desperation and longing. Look at her and Guy. Could Ross have prevented that? No. But ultimately, by his simple presence, yes, he had ended it. Emily could at least have the grace to return the compliment. Would it kill her to let him run loose for a little while? Marjorie was not serious competition. She was probably disease free. So Ross slept with her a few times, big deal. It wasn’t the end of the world. Emily stared miserably at the white, billowy clouds beneath the airplane. From this distance they looked so dense, so magically strong; just like her fifteen years of marriage.

  Beneath the clouds, all was rain. Landing in sheets of wind and water, Emily’s flight wobbled to a halt at the terminal. She wearily deplaned, suddenly and violently hoping that Ross would be inside to greet her. No way, of course; life never glittered like the movies. Emily called the cabin. Nearly eight o’clock: Philippa should be in a frenzy by now. Emily waited as the phone rang and rang. Where the hell was her sister? Swimming? Finally she hung up and called home. Got the damn machine. In a fit
of bravado, Emily called Ross at the office. “Enjoying the sunshine?” he asked cheerfully.

  “What sunshine? I’m at the airport.”

  “Great! When’s the flight getting in?”

  “It’s in, Ross. I’m at Logan.”

  “Which terminal? I’ll pick you up.”

  “Don’t bother. My car’s in long-term parking. I think I’ll go up to the cabin tonight. Keep Philippa company.”

  “I wouldn’t, darling. She’s gone.”

  “What! How do you know that?”

  “Because I took her to the airport last night. She took the late flight to Kennedy.”

  “Where’d she go from there?”

  “I got the impression she was going to take the first thing anywhere.”

  “And you just let her do that? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I’d say I drove all night in the pouring rain to indulge a raving lunatic. Look, I’m trying to wrap up a long day. See you in an hour or two.”

  Philippa had called Ross? And he had actually gone to New Hampshire to pick her up? Feeling faint, Emily went home.

  Ross shuffled in around ten o’clock, inexplicably jovial. When he saw his wife waiting for him with a pitcher of martinis, he hugged and kissed her for a long time. “Tell me about your trip,” he said, taking his first icy swig of gin, blessing the genius who had invented distilled spirits. He led her to the couch.

  “Not much to tell,” Emily replied. “I slept in a noisy hotel for three hundred bucks. Then Simon took me to an incredibly phony restaurant for breakfast. This Czech producer never even showed up. A waiter threw a script on the table and said that shooting began in two weeks. Simon was too cheap to spring for food, so we left. I went to his office and checked in with the president of Philippa’s fan club. Then I came home.”

  “That’s it? Why did you go out at all?”

  “Philippa thought this producer wanted to meet her before making an offer.”

  “Something odd there,” Ross said helpfully. “Kind of a wild goose chase.” He let that petite stink bomb roll around a moment. “What were you doing with the president of Philippa’s fan club? Forging autographs?”