This morning, after she dropped the twins at school, she came home and spent an hour on the Nordic Trac in the home gym she and Billy had built, then took a bath. She was sitting at her dressing table putting moisturizer on her long white legs, trying to decide what to wear on a commercial interview that afternoon, when she heard the unmistakable voom-bah of a Ferrari pulling into her driveway. Billy.
From the bedroom window she saw him hop out of the car, watched the top of his head, balding a little in the middle of the blond curly hair. As he moved toward the front door, she felt her panic rise. What in the world did he want at her house in the middle of the day? She threw open her closet and tried to decide if she should change out of her robe and into something decent.
Ellen would tell her, “It doesn’t matter how you look. He doesn’t see you anyway, he only sees himself.” Rose would tell her she should ignore the bell and pretend to be out. Of course her car was in the driveway, so she couldn’t do that. And Jan, the only one of them who always believed there was still hope for Marly and Billy to get back together, would say, “Gussy up, honey. Make him eat his heart out.”
Oh hell. She ran down the stairs through the large marble foyer and pulled the door open. Billy, still six inches shorter than she was, stood leaning on the door jamb, and she hated the way seeing him there made her melt. That wild blond hair and little-boy look of his made every woman in America want to pull him to her bosom and still did her in.
“Hey,” he said, smiling his most adorable Billy smile. It was one of a repertoire of smiles Marly knew so well that one night, when they were still wildly in love, she’d described them and named them for him, and he’d laughed in her arms about how well she knew him. This was one she called, “Howdy, Ma’am.” It had a degree of reticence, a politesse, and a humility Billy didn’t possess anywhere in his actual emotional makeup, only as an arrow in his performer’s quiver.
“I have all the encyclopedias I need,” Marly said, and he grinned.
“I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d stop by and remind you that tonight’s the first taping of my new show, so I’ll be sending a car and driver to get the twins at around five-thirty, and if I could have them for two nights, I’d like to take them to Disneyland—“
“But your secretary and your publicist and your manager were all too busy to call and ask me those questions, the way they usually do?” she asked. He laughed at that, but it was an embarrassed laugh.
“Look, Mar, I’ve been a jerk. I know that. I made a mess out of our lives together and don’t think I don’t know it was all my fault. But I’ve been thinking all week about coming over to ask you if you thought that there was ever a way that we could all get back together and be a family again.”
Marly stared at him, sure this had to be a dream. That any minute the phone would ring or the alarm would go off and wake her. This was not Billy Mann, TV star, her soon to be ex-husband, doing the impossible. Think carefully, her shrink told her, before you say anything to him. Don’t let him get to you. So she took a long pause, and finally spoke.
“Billy.” She felt herself trying not to tremble. “In my lifetime, I’ve seen a lot of things. Men walking on the moon, and the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War. I even saw the nutrition pyramid change so that carbohydrates are now better for me than protein, something I always wished would happen. So I know there are miracles in this world, and good ones, too. But I still don’t believe that one of those could possibly be that you’d want to have a family experience. So what do you really want?”
In spite of her words she was drowning in hope. Being pulled down by the inexplicable possibility that the impossible had happened. But at the same time knowing it was absurd, childish, to believe it. No, a better word would be lunacy.
“Yes, but Mar, you’re the one who always says you’re invested in the idea that the human spirit has the capacity for change. And I know if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be working so hard with that shrink of yours, or signing up for all the self-help workshops you go to, or reading all the books about Eastern philosophies.”
“True, but I’m the one who’s doing all of that, not you, which means you’re not the one who’s changing. So no, I don’t think we have a chance. At least not now. You’d need to do a lot of work on yourself before I could ever go back.” When the words were out of her mouth, she said a little prayer that he’d give her an argument.
“What if I start doing the work? Did a crash course, like the Stanley Kaplan’s, for becoming a good guy?”
“What if you did?”
“Would you give us a shot?”
She was choking on the words, yes, I love you, but what she said was, “I have to think about it.”
“Can I come in while you do?”
She sighed and stepped back into the foyer, and he followed her, taking in the hall and then the high-ceilinged living room that she’d redone three times since he’d left, just to keep busy. “The house looks great,” he said appreciatively. He’d never once said that when he lived there.
“Thanks.”
“You look great,” he said, looking at her body in the white Fernando Sanchez robe.
“Billy, what do you want? What is it? This is such a stunning overnight change, you’ll forgive me if I suspect it.”
He was wandering ahead of her to the kitchen and she followed him on the cold marble floor, in her bare feet, having a sudden rush of worry that she hadn’t had a pedicure in a month and that maybe her toenails looked bad.
“I don’t know. Mid-life crisis, maybe. Looking at my life, sitting at that desk every night interviewing all those women, like tonight my guests are that pig Madonna and that moron Kim Basinger, and I know I’ll be thinking ‘Yeah? So what?’ They wear too much makeup, they push too hard, they need writers to make them funny, and you don’t.”
In a sudden move, he hoisted himself up to sit on the center chopping-block island, which was where he always used to sit when he lived there, just where he used to like to sit on those delicious nights when after sex they’d come down to the kitchen to have a pot of tea. It felt so nostalgic to Marly that she hurried to the stove, turned on the kettle, and looked in the brisker to see if there were any cookies.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I still can’t do it.”
Please, she prayed, whirling around, don’t let him change his mind. “But I think I’ve grown up,” he went on, staring out the window. “I think I finally get it. So what can I say? When I look back on my life, the only times I remember ever really being happy were the times I was in the house with you and the twins. I know we weren’t always in sync.”
Marly couldn’t control a snicker.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, “you can laugh. You should laugh. We both know I was a dog. But I need to change. I want to be good for my family. And I think I can.”
Marly stood completely still in the spot, afraid that her moving might make him reconsider again. “And did I mention that I really love you?” he asked. Oh, God. He hadn’t said those words to her in years. She took two cups and saucers out of a cupboard and hoped he didn’t hear them clinking together because she was trembling as she put them on the counter.
“Actually you didn’t mention that,” she said.
He sighed and looked long at her with very big, sad eyes. “Well, I really really do,” he said and he put out a hand for her to come and take, which she did. And as he studied her hand that still had a white circle around the third finger from her recently removed wedding band, he said, “We both know I don’t deserve it, but if you take me back, I swear you won’t be sorry.” Then he kissed each of her fingers.
“Don’t do that, Billy,” she said with zero conviction in her voice. She’d been celibate since he left. He took each of her arms in his hands and put them around his waist, then looked into her eyes. Sitting on the counter made his head higher than hers, which was probably the reason he did it.
“I love you,
Mar,” he said mow, putting his hands in her white curly hair that had been piled on top of her head in the bathtub and was coming down, as a bobby pin found its way down her neck and into the back of the robe. She closed her eyes, knowing he would kiss her, praying he would kiss her.
Please don’t let me ever wake up, she thought as his lips touched hers softly, then harder, and then he slid down from the counter and put his feet on the floor, while her silky white robe seemed to fall open without any help at all. And on the kitchen banquette, at ten-thirty in the morning, Marly Bennet was making hot, wet love with her almost ex-husband, and both of them were crying while the tea kettle whistle shrieked.
“I love you, I’ll always love you, I’m so afraid.” Marly wasn’t sure later which of them said which of those words, or if both of them said them all. Afterward, they had tea and cookies, and when Billy stood at the door, he reminded her about the car and driver coming to pick up the twins at five-thirty to take them to his taping, and he said he’d call her tomorrow to find out what she thought of the show.
“A pain reliever,” she said on the way back upstairs. That was the product in the commercial she was auditioning for today. Some pain reliever, though her agent, Harry, told her when he called that he wasn’t sure which pain reliever. Usually she had more information to go on—what the character in the commercial was like, what income stratum, what lifestyle, so she’d know how to dress.
“Well, no pain relievers for this girl today,” she said out loud, laughing a happy laugh.
* * *
8
Before she realized that a successful career could turn a relationship into a ménage à trois, with the career as the third being, Marly was happy. Her career had been moving along nicely before she met Billy, but she tried hard not to let the success get to her equanimity. She would not let her ego get inflated like the balloons in the Macy’s parade the way she’d seen it happen to so many actors. So far she’d avoided having the obligatory entourage of managers, publicists, personal trainers, and masseuses.
When she and Billy met at the Improv, she’d been on “The Corner Bar,” her first TV situation comedy, for two years, and her style as a gifted comedienne was already well respected. She had a healthy salary, loved the work, and was very hopeful about her future. And she knew she was doing something right when she was introduced at the tapings and ran out to take her bow and the studio audience went wild cheering for her.
She remembered reading an article about one of her favorite actors, James Cagney, who was quoted as describing his career as “just a job,” something he did well but into which he didn’t invest his soul. Marly was determined to treat hers that way, too.
“Way bigger bucks,” Billy said to her one night in the car as he drove her home from the taping. He came to nearly every Friday night shoot, because Friday nights at the Comedy Store and the Improv were the night when the polished, well-known stand-up comics got up to work. Low-on-the-totem-pole guys like Billy Mann were relegated to working during the week. At Marly’s tapings he sat in a seat the network pages also roped off for him in the front row, and he cheered the loudest for Marly when she came out for her bow.
“Your character is breaking out. They should spin her off,” he said to her in that inside lingo that bothered Marly when he used it.
“Thank you, honey,” she said, sitting back with her eyes closed against the passenger seat of Billy’s old Datsun with the ripped upholstery. She was pleased with the way the taping had gone that night.
“I think you hire a PR guy tomorrow and start a campaign to get them to give you your own show.”
She laughed.
“I mean it.”
She should have known then, and maybe she really did in her solar plexus, that Billy’s ambition would be what brought them down.
“It’s okay, Bill,” she said. “I’ll get there in time.”
“Not if you don’t step on people’s necks you won’t.”
She remembered how he pulled his hand away from hers that night when she patted his hand to calm him down. “You have to ride the wave,” he warned. “You only get so many of them. This is yours. Don’t just let it move you around. Get on top of it.”
She didn’t feel his brand of desperation, his hunger. She had grown up in a world of abundance, with a handsome doctor father, an elegant picture-book mother, in a home and a town in New England out of Currier and Ives. Billy was a poor kid from a big Catholic family in which he had to be funny to get attention. And now, even though he was a history-making late-night star, no amount of attention ever seemed to be enough for him.
So when he started making it on television, he went hog wild. Not just for himself and his career, but for Marly and the twins Marly had carried after “The Corner Bar” went off the air. Billy was a hit stand-up comic guesting on other people’s shows and making Johnny Carson laugh so hard the star had to put his face down on the desk. And after a while he was making very big money as a headliner in Las Vegas.
He spent every dime, on a new house, new cars, overly lavish birthday parties, trips in private planes, and on a staff of so many people that one day Marly found herself coming home from taking the girls to the park and asking some strange woman in a uniform in her kitchen, “Who in the hell are you?”
The woman was the special nutritionist bringing bodybuilding meals for Mr. Mann. Too much, it had all been too much. Especially after Billy got his own show, when things started moving out of the realm of the real world. It wasn’t the same as being an actor on a sit-com whom people stopped on the street and squinted at and asked, “Aren’t you, uh… on that show… what’s it called again?” This was different. This was about walking into every restaurant and watching people sit up and crane their necks, and about hearing the constant hum of his name, Billy Mann, Billy Mann, look, Billy Mann.
And people coming to the table when he was buttering his roll, or worse yet, making a toast to his wonderful wife, strangers thrusting their napkin and a pen at him for an autograph. And asking him personal questions and telling him which of his shows they hated and loved. Of course there was no way they couldn’t love Billy.
It drove the twins crazy. Once they had to leave Disneyland because Billy couldn’t go two feet without being mobbed. The twins were nine or ten then, and Marly remembered their, “Oh noooos,” as each time Billy signed the autographs and amused the group who approached him. And just as he felt able to extricate himself and move his family away, another group of fans would move in on him.
“I’ll call Eisner,” Marly remembered him saying as they got back into the limo that brought them to the park, the big, long stretch limo that drove back on the freeway toward home before they even had a chance to go on one ride. The twins were both sobbing in disappointment. “I made a mistake thinking I could do this without advancing it,” Billy said. “I should have called Eisner a month ago and just asked him to close the park for us,” he said, looking guiltily out the window of the limo.
“I hate you, Daddy,” Sarah said. “I want a real person for a father. Not you!”
Marly shook her head, remembering that sad ride home as she found a parking place down the road from the casting office. She took a deep breath and steeled herself for today’s interview. A painkiller, she thought, pulling her rearview mirror down to take a last satisfied look at herself. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” she said to her reflection and got out of the car.
In the reception area of the casting office there were a lot of women, chatting in that guarded, friendly way they did in these situations. Women who under other circumstances might have let their hair down with one another, in this room where they knew a big job was at stake, were tense and phonily sweet. Marly looked at them all and had an urge to stand up and say, “I just had the best sex in the world with the sexiest man alive. My husband, and he still loves me.” But instead she floated along with her lovely inner grin.
She looked around at the different types, tryin
g to figure out what the casting people were looking for. In this group there were the folky-looking plaid-flannel-shirt types and a few perfect-hair types, and there was one very glamorous woman with black curly hair who was dressed in Chanel. And they were all up for the same part. She sighed and took a seat, waiting to go in. One actress emerged, looked flustered, and announced to everyone in the room after the door closed behind her, “It’s an ice-cold reading, and they give you about a minute to look at the words,” then flounced tearfully out of the waiting room.
Cold readings. Marly was good at those. Instead of giving you a long time to look at the script, they handed it to you, gave you a few minutes to look it over, and then you took your best shot, reading with one of the casting people. When it was Marly’s turn to go in, she felt confident. She had always aced cold readings. And this would be for a one-minute commercial. In the past she’d read cold for miniseries, for heaven’s sake. This would be nothing.
When the casting director saw it was Marly coming in, she stood and walked over to welcome her. “Marly Bennet, how are you?” she asked, and there was a reverence to the greeting that made Marly feel okay about being seen this way, as one of a group. After all, she told herself as part of the litany she always went through to make her feel more comfortable, her television career over the years had been substantial.
The only reason she was doing this was that at her age good parts for actresses were hard to come by. At least commercials were something to do, a way to feel you were working, still in the business, in front of the camera.
And this was the unfortunate way they cast the damn things. Unless, of course, you were a big name. Like Lindsay Wagner, doing commercials for Ford. Not what they called a semi-name, in the middle class of the business, which was where Marly’s career fell.
Show Business Kills Page 7