Love Me Tender

by Laurie Horowitz

  Leslie doesn’t care what Olive thinks anymore. This story was something Leslie had to write—her public love letter. It doesn’t matter if it gets a zillion hits or none at all. She doesn’t care if people think it’s good or the worst piece of garbage ever published. There is only one reader she cares about now. So long as Patton King reads it and sees it as the heartfelt apology it is, her story will be a success.

  There’s a knock on the door. She hopes it’s Patton, but that would be too much to wish for. He couldn’t have seen the article yet, or could he? Leslie’s heart is pounding to the beat of a rock opera—Tommy or Quadrophenia. She’s beginning to think in music now, though she never has before. She would have said she was more interested in visual art, but the references that have come to mind recently are all musical. Her brother, Henry, would call that the yellow Mini Cooper syndrome. You want a yellow Mini Cooper and all you see are yellow Mini Coopers.

  When she opens the door to Hunter, the rock opera turns into a dirge.

  “Come on in.” She turns to let him follow her inside. “If you’ve come here to yell at me, you might as well forget it. I’ve done that to myself already. Multiple times.”

  “It’s just as much my fault as yours,” Hunter says, plunking down on the club chair. “I feel awful. I haven’t been able to look Patton in the eye, which is very inconvenient since we live in the same small house.”

  “I wrote something new, sort of a retraction.”

  “I know. I just saw it. It was kinda beautiful.”

  “Kinda?”

  “It was a great story. Really. I liked it even better than the other one. Well, I liked it much better. It wasn’t quite as funny and certainly not as snarky, but it put me in a good mood. Hard to explain. Maybe I’m just happy it says good things about Patton. Maybe I’m relieved. I don’t know, but after I finished reading the story, I found myself smiling.”

  Leslie is touched. She looked for laughs in her pieces about Marshmallow Fluff, wife carrying, and pumpkin festivals, but she always went for the easy guffaw with pitiless humor. She took what was inherently warm and fuzzy and made it cool and glib. That had been the secret to her success, such as it was.

  Hunter stands up and puts his hands in his pockets. “It was almost as if someone else wrote it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone who wasn’t you.”

  “But it was me.”

  “That’s what’s so great about it.”

  “You think Patton will see it?”

  “I showed it to him.”

  Leslie leans on the dresser to steady herself.

  “You going to be all right?” Hunter asks.

  “I might be having an anxiety attack.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I’ve never had one before.”

  Hunter gets Leslie a bottle of water from the counter. He opens it and holds it to her lips like a mother holding a bottle for a baby. Leslie takes the bottle and gulps it down. “Thanks.” Water is running down her chin.

  “Sit down,” Hunter says.

  Leslie perches on the side of the bed. “Do you think Patton will see me?” she asks.

  Hunter shrugs. Hunter has never known Patton to hold a grudge. But Patton just met Leslie, and perhaps the smartest thing he could do is cut and run. This is too tumultuous.

  Hunter likes easy women like Sarabeth who follow him around until they snare him. It may not be electrifying, but it has the advantage of being safe. All this breathlessness and early disappointment between Leslie and Patton couldn’t be good. And what kind of future could they have, this blue-blooded girl with an Ivy League education and this wrong-side-of-the-tracks boy who only graduated from high school? A bird can love a fish, but where would they live? That was an expression Hunter’s mother often used. He thinks she got it from the Cinderella movie with Drew Barrymore in it.

  “Do you know where I can find him?” Leslie asks, her brown eyes wet and guileless. This is not the same person Hunter met only a few nights ago, the one who came here digging for dirt. Leslie’s eyes were flintier then. She’d been weighing all the angles. This new Leslie is a girl in love. She is obviously terrified that she has alienated Patton forever.

  Hunter can’t help but take pity on her.

  Chapter 25

  It’s a beautiful day at Cheekwood Botanical Garden, but Leslie barely notices. Her internal temperature is rising fast. She’s in a panic. What if she can’t find Patton? And worse—what if she finds him and he sends her packing? He might forgive her, but he could just as easily decide that she is too much trouble. And honestly, who could blame him?

  Still, she has to risk it.

  When she gets to the Wildflower Garden, she stops and takes a deep breath. When she was small, she and her father used to take nature walks on the Vineyard. He taught her the names of the flowers they saw: black-eyed Susan, Queen Anne’s lace. If they were lucky, they might find a lady’s slipper.

  Leslie’s father had let his career wreck any chance of happiness he might have had with Leslie’s mother. Or, maybe they’d been too different to begin with. Leslie’s sure they loved each other once. Maybe if her father hadn’t exposed her mother’s pet charity as a fraud, her parents would have been able to stumble along together.

  Leslie always wanted to be more like her father than her mother. In a contest between intellect and emotion, Leslie always chose intellect. It was Leslie’s mother who followed her heart from one inappropriate man to another. If she hadn’t, Leslie and Henry would never have been born. Journalist Michael Stern was certainly an unsuitable choice in the eyes of the Arlingtons. He was Jewish, for one thing, and virtually penniless. He was a no one from nowhere.

  Out of all the Arlingtons, Leslie’s grandfather was the only one who really liked him. After all, her grandfather had hired Michael to work at The Courier. Her grandfather had seen Michael’s promise as a writer. He’d been right when it came to that, and everyone else was right when it came to Michael Stern’s promise as a husband.

  Leslie has always prided herself on not being like her mother. While Abby Arlington attends every charity ball and coming-out party on the social calendar, Leslie only attends society functions when she is reporting on them. Henry calls it reverse snobbery.

  As Leslie enters Wills Perennial Garden, a wedding materializes. It’s like Brigadoon when the village appears as if out of nowhere. In that story, two American men come upon an enchanted hamlet in Scotland that emerges from the mist only once every hundred years. One of the men, played by Gene Kelly (and Patton in high school), falls in love with a girl from the village—Fiona. If he wants to stay with her, he has to give up everyone and everything he’s ever known. When Leslie was small, she could never wrap her head around the desire to do that, especially since the couple in the movie had only known each other one day. Now she understands.

  I told ye when ye love someone deeply enough, anythin’ is possible. Even miracles. She hears the line from the movie in her head. Her mother used to whisper it to her, like a lullaby, before Leslie went to sleep. Leslie hasn’t thought about that for years. For the first time in ages, she has an urge to speak to her mother.

  Leslie stops on the edge of the garden and watches as the bride and groom lean toward each other. From where she is standing, it’s as if they are alone in an arbor, just the two of them in front of a clergyman.

  Leslie has never been one to picture her own wedding. Some of her friends at Deerfield Academy kept computer files and scrapbooks containing pictures of the dresses they wanted, the names of their attendants, possible venues, and a variety of menus. Not one of them listed fewer than eight bridesmaids. The wedding dresses were all Vera Wang. Each of these imagined weddings ran a close second to Kate Middleton’s.

  Leslie spent the time these girls devoted to their imagined nuptials creating files of stories written by the journalists she admired. She’d investigate any story she could find. Her most controversial article had to do with a
grades-buying scandal. Her friends nicknamed her Lois Lane, then Lois, and by the time she left for college, she was Lolo.

  Looking at this couple getting married on a weekday afternoon in a garden with just a handful of friends, Leslie realizes that this was another one of her dreams; she just needed someone to show it to her. She wants to remain there and watch the ceremony, but she needs to move on, to find Patton. Before she came to Nashville, she thought she knew just what she wanted, but she can no longer picture the future. It’s hard to see herself plodding to the old office every day and living the same life she’s always had. Everything is different now.

  Leslie hears the soft sound of music and follows it. It gets louder. Suddenly, he’s in front of her, her own apparition. Patton King is standing in the center of the stone amphitheater in the Sigourney Cheek Literary Garden, serenading a small audience.

  And he’s playing “Unchained Melody.”

  When she arrives, Patton continues to play, but now he is playing only to her. They might as well be alone in the garden, alone in the world. She knows he is telling her how he feels. He may be using someone else’s words, but they might as well be his own. His voice resonates with feeling, but most of what he needs to say is in his eyes.

  Leslie wells up with emotion. He does love her. He isn’t going to send her away. She is flooded with such relief that she almost sinks onto the stones of the amphitheater. When the song comes to an end, Leslie’s heart is thumping. She manages to walk toward Patton.

  “I don’t know what to say.” She stands a few feet away from him, afraid to move any closer.

  “I think this says it all.” He holds out a printed copy of her article. He gives her his Elvis smile, but it’s also Patton’s smile. Perhaps it’s a tad naive, but it’s also open and honest. This is the man she loves, and she was willing to do whatever it took to keep him, even if that meant exposing her feelings to the whole world. Isn’t that what couples strive toward in a wedding, a public declaration of love?

  Well, Leslie’s declared herself to anyone who has access to the internet. Last week, she would have said that no one should write an article like “Rock & Write,” that something like that would cause her infinite embarrassment. Now, her only feeling is one of unbounded joy.

  “You took my advice,” Patton says.

  “How do you mean?” she asks, still not stepping forward.

  “You wrote with your heart, not your head.”

  “Was that what you were trying to tell me with Sullivan’s Travels?”

  He nods.

  He turns away from her, and she thinks she’s read everything wrong. He takes a step and leans down to place his guitar on his jacket. Patton looks back over his shoulder toward Leslie and gives her a smile. He has a beautiful smile. That’s what Leslie is thinking as she walks into his arms.

  They kiss. If this were a movie, the camera would pull back on the gardens in all their glory. And our two lovers would remain entwined in the center of it all.

  Epilogue

  Leslie squeezes Patton’s hand. They are sitting in the lobby of a historic Hollywood building. He looks incredibly handsome in the new jacket they just picked up on Rodeo Drive. They bought it a few days ago when they arrived in California, but the alterations weren’t completed until this morning. When they were shopping, Patton said he felt like Julia Roberts from Pretty Woman—and not in a good way.

  Leslie watched the salesmen at Brioni dart around in an effort to please Patton. She had never used her money this way before. The key to old money in Massachusetts is pretending you don’t have any. Growing up wealthy, Leslie had the self-assurance that came with financial security. Patton, no matter how much he protested, stood a little taller in the Brioni jacket, as if the fine fabric and first-rate tailoring had confidence sewn into the seams.

  Leslie had been devastated when the paper was sold a week after she returned from Nashville, but on the upside, she had twice as much money the day after the sale as she had on the day before. Patton encouraged her to embrace the change rather than resist it. Once she let go of everything she’d been hanging onto with such ferocity, all sorts of other things flooded in. She was offered a job at Garden & Gun, whose main offices were in Charleston. She and Patton could live there together if he wanted to stay in the south.

  But now, here they were in Hollywood. Leslie couldn’t believe this was her first time. California might as well be a different country. The clothes. The accents. The attitudes. Leslie decided that for one week she was going to go wild. It isn’t exactly what someone with a social conscience like her father would do, but it was a good time. In fact, she’d never had so much fun. She and Patton were staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with its distinctive awnings. Elvis had stayed there during the filming of G.I. Blues and this seemed like a good omen.

  “I feel like a kept man,” Patton said as they walked out of Brioni. “I don’t think I like it.” It looked like they were about to have their first fight, if you didn’t count that major fiasco three months ago that almost broke them up before they even got started.

  “You’ll pay me back. You know you will. I’m only laying the money out as an investment,” Leslie said.

  “I’m not even sure I need these clothes.”

  “You don’t need them, but as you would be the first to tell me, you are in show business. And show business requires a little spit and polish.”

  “But I’m a country singer, not a hedge fund manager.”

  “No money manager has enough style to wear that castle-gray jacket the way you do. I can guarantee it.” She reached up and kissed him.

  A few weeks ago, Leslie had read that Sony was remaking The Last Picture Show as a musical. They were thinking of doing it like Movin’ Out, a musical created by Twyla Tharp using Billy Joel’s songs. The producers of The Last Picture Show, the musical, wanted to use Elvis Presley hits. Leslie knew Patton would be perfect for it.

  She’d called Olive for help.

  Olive hadn’t been hired by TMZ as she had hoped, but she did get a job with an edgy Hollywood blog and was already dating a powerful casting agent.

  “You owe me,” Leslie had said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because you tortured me with those silly stories and then you manipulated me into writing the one about Patton. And let’s face it, we both got plenty of attention for that one. It’s what probably got you your job.”

  “That’s fairly egotistical, isn’t it?” Olive said, but she knew that Leslie was right. It was largely due to Leslie that Olive was sitting in this pristine office overlooking Sunset Boulevard. She got a thrill every time she saw the Hollywood sign, but what had been more thrilling was the moment Olive moved out of the Boston office and tossed every kitschy thing Leslie had ever given her into the dumpster. The only item she kept was a life-sized cutout of Elvis, and that was standing in the corner of her office now.

  “But I’m not an actor,” Patton had protested to Leslie.

  “Neither was Elvis.”

  “I’m not sure about this,” he said.

  “You’ll get so much exposure. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “I thought I knew what I wanted before I met you, but now you’re pretty much all I think about.”

  They’d been having this conversation in bed. Leslie had straddled Patton and given him a long sweet kiss, the kind she’d always dreamt of. She had a small repertoire of kisses now: the lazy Sunday morning kiss, the passionate midnight kiss, and the kiss that whispered I love you. Each one was sweeter than Tupelo honey.

  “This is how I see us,” Leslie said. “Both of us are at the top of our game, doing work we love, and loving each other.”

  “That’s a very pretty picture, darlin’.” Patton grabbed Leslie and moved her under him with one swift motion. He stared into her eyes for a long time.

  Leslie knew what Patton was thinking, because they’d discussed it many times. He was worried he’d make a gigantic fool of hims
elf at this audition. Nola hadn’t thought it was a good idea. She said it was premature, that he should do more gigs around Nashville before he ventured out to Hollywood. Leslie was praying that Nola was wrong.

  This thing with Patton was a miracle. The sex was earth-shattering and, though it was hard to believe, their banter was even better than the sex—well, just as good. They only interrupted their endless conversation to make love.

  They were always laughing. Patton once told Leslie that when she was in the room, everything looked sharper. When she left it, the colors dimmed. He said he’d never felt this way, that, usually, when he was with a woman, he needed some space. But when Leslie wasn’t at his side, he had a nagging feeling that something crucial was missing.

  And she felt that way, too.

  Now, here they are, waiting in the lobby of the building that houses LPS Productions. They are sitting in a three-story atrium with a skylight at the top and modern art on the walls. Patton is beginning to sweat. He is pretty sure he is going to embarrass himself, that he isn’t ready for this next step, that Nola was right.

  A girl in skinny jeans, a blue silk blouse, and the highest heels Patton has ever seen clacks toward them.

  “Patton King?” she asks, smiling.

  He stands up from the Eames sofa and reaches down for Leslie.

  “And this is Leslie Stern,” Patton says, turning toward her.

  “And she is …” The woman waits.

  “She is …” Patton pauses. He doesn’t want to say girlfriend. It will sound unprofessional. “My—”

  “Manager? Agent? Lawyer?”

  “I guess you could say she’s my everything.”

  The woman shows Leslie to a plastic folding chair. Three people, including Olive’s boyfriend, Brendan Puck, are sitting behind a table on the far side of the room.

  After speaking some lines, Patton is supposed to sing for them. He has already taken his guitar out of its case and hung the strap around his neck. To prepare, he watched The Last Picture Show six times.