Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  “We look like the opening scene in Macbeth,” Ellen said.

  “After we get the results of this test, we ought to take turns going home,” Marly said. Her white hair was wild around her pretty face. “I need to get to my house and make sure Joey’s being taken care of properly. I felt fine about leaving him with Maria because she’s been his prime caretaker for so long, but we have to consider the effect of the trauma. We need to find him a child therapist right away, so he doesn’t walk around with rage inside him for the rest of his life.”

  “And grow up to be a studio executive,” Ellen muttered sleepily.

  “As soon as we talk to the doctor, you can both go home for a while, and I’ll stay,” Rose said. “Molly has a play date today, and Andy will come back here to make rounds. So I’ll just call him and ask him if he’ll bring me some clean clothes.”

  They rinsed their mouths, Ellen ran a brush through her thick auburn hair, Marly lifted the top of her pouffy cotton-candy curls with a pick comb, and Rose pushed her hair back behind her ears. “It’ll take them a while to do the tests. Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

  Their heels clicked on the terrazzo floors as they walked down the hall into the elevator and then across the lobby, where a white-haired guard at a desk was reading a Stephen King paperback. Marly pushed the hospital doors open, and they stepped outside into the new day.

  Silently, they moved together down Beverly Boulevard, past the Beverly Center. It was just dawn, and they could make out shapes in doorways of the sleeping homeless. A siren screamed, and an ambulance rushed past them heading for the hospital.

  “Oh, what I would give to have my worst worry be Alex Bibberman, the way it was yesterday,” Ellen said.

  “Isn’t it awful the way we need disaster to remind us what matters and what’s nonsense?” Marly asked.

  “You’re right,” Rose said. “There are days when I get caught up in the insanity and spin out on what I’m not doing, what I should be doing, what other people are probably doing, and worry myself into a frazzle. Last month I canceled my subscription to the trade papers because I realized that while I was reading them my stomach ached.”

  They moved swiftly, sometimes walking three abreast, sometimes single file, sometimes holding on to one another as they crossed the streets. At Fairfax Avenue, catty-corner to the snowy white CBS studio, they stopped for a red light, and Rose looked up and then smiled.

  “Look,” she said, and the others followed her gaze. It was a billboard for Billy’s show. A giant picture of Billy with an ingratiating grin on his cute face. Marly’s face melted into a mixed look of pain and adoration.

  She sighed, and without taking her eyes from the billboard, she said, “It’s so ridiculous, but I love him with that same kind of aching, overwhelming love we used to feel about boys when we were adolescents. I still get a rush every time he walks in my door. And it never goes away, no matter what name I give it, no matter what cure I take, trying to do away with feelings I’ve branded with every psychological term ever coined. And you know what? Werner said that life gets easier if we ride the horse in the direction it’s going, and that’s what I’ve decided I’m going to do. I’m going to call him and tell him I want him to come home as soon as he can.”

  She looked at her two friends and paused, waiting for the protests, for one of them to say, “Mistake! The man can’t cut it. He’ll just hurt you again.” But both of them just nodded.

  “I think if anyone made me feel that way, I sure as shit would set all the mental health books on fire and grab it,” Ellen said.

  Rose put an arm around Marly. “You’ll make it work,” she said.

  Marly knew that they doubted Billy’s staying power as much as she did, but they wanted it to work for her and were willing to support her through it. As the three friends stood on the street corner, oblivious to the traffic noises that were picking up, the L.A. morning sun rose in the sky. The Beverly Boulevard bus rumbled to a stop next to them and two women got off chatting away in Spanish and walked off down the street. The bus pulled away, leaving a cloud of exhaust, but they didn’t notice that, either.

  “I love you both so much,” Marly said. “I want to say it now, because I wish I had said it to Jan more often. All I thought about last night while we sat in Jan’s room was that I probably hadn’t let her know how much her wonderful gift of friendship meant to me. How I always loved hearing her voice at the other end of the phone. How sometimes when I felt so low I could barely move, I’d think about the stories she told that made me laugh so much, and I was grateful that I had her in my life. So please, let’s not wait to praise one another, remind each other all the time of everything we have together, and what that’s worth.”

  “I love both of you, too,” Ellen said, tears gushing out of her eyes. Cars and trucks were whizzing by the busy Hollywood corner. “I know I’m tough on you, Mar, and I hear myself doing it sometimes, and I hate myself for it. You two and Janny have walked me through this life at times when I thought I couldn’t take another step. When Rogie was little and I was so alone, the times you three had us over for meals, picked him up at school when I couldn’t, gave him advice when he thought my advice was stupid and yours was cool.”

  “We’ve come such a long distance with one another,” Rose said. Marveling while she looked at them through her own puddle-filled eyes, that she not only knew the reason for nearly every line on their beautiful faces, but the season when it was acquired.

  “Yeah,” Ellen joked. “All the way to CBS.” She took a tissue out of her bag, and as she wiped her nose, she looked up and saw two old Hassidic Jewish men walk by dressed in their long black coats and black hats. This was the neighborhood of delis and Judaica shops and kosher butcher shops, and home to many elderly Jews.

  Ellen smiled. “My friend Artie Butler once told me that he was supposed to meet somebody at CBS one day,” she said. “And the person he was meeting didn’t know how to get there, so the directions Artie gave the guy were, ‘You go down Fairfax Avenue, and the first place that doesn’t have a chicken in the window is CBS.’ ”

  Laughing, and with their arms around one another, they headed back to the hospital.

  At eight-fifteen Jan’s bed came rumbling off the elevator and was wheeled past them in the seventh-floor corridor and back into ICU. A few minutes later the neurosurgeon arrived. He was a thin, balding man with kind eyes, who nodded to them as he moved in to the cubicle to examine Jan. When he came out into the hall a few minutes later, his expression was grim.

  “Do any of you know if she has a durable power of attorney for health care?” he asked, looking at each of them.

  “Oh, God,” Ellen said.

  “Her sister told me last night that Jan talked about a will in which she was planning to nominate her as the guardian of her son, so maybe the durable power of attorney for health care is with it,” Rose told him.

  “I can go to her house and look for a will,” Marly said.

  “It’s necessary,” the doctor said. “The prognosis is very serious. I reviewed the CAT scan, and her clinical picture has deteriorated since the imaging study we did before the surgery. The blow to her head caused massive damage and the edema is worse. There’s a lot of pressure in her skull, and it’s pushing down onto her brain stem.

  “We can wait a few days to see if that changes, but I believe if we extubate her, it will only be a very short time until she dies. Right now I think we should hold off taking out the tube until we determine if her wish is for us to take extraordinary measures to care for her or not.”

  “What are the chances the swelling will go down?” Ellen asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “I guess I’d better find out if she put any of that in writing,” Marly said.

  “When you do, you can call my office or have me paged here at the hospital.”

  When he was gone, none of them spoke. Marly shuffled in her purse looking for the key to Jan’s that she had taken yesterday
from Maria. When she found it, she held it up and said to the others, “I’m going to her house.”

  “Wasn’t it taped off by the police?” Rose asked.

  “No, the police who were there when I went by to get Joey yesterday told me that they only do that if the victim…” She couldn’t make herself say the word dies.

  “I’ll walk out with you,” Ellen said to Marly, “and be back this afternoon,” she promised Rose.

  When Marly drove up the narrow street and saw Jan’s Lexus in the driveway, her chest ached with sadness. She parked her car in the carport behind Jan’s and sat for a while. The distant sound of a leaf blower clacking filled the air. The little hill house was so isolated from the neighboring homes, it was easy to understand how someone could come there, shoot Jan, and get away without anyone noticing.

  She turned the key and walked into the silent foyer. The area rug that usually filled the front hall was gone. Last night when she came, she saw Jan’s blood on it. The police must have taken it away. There were toys still scattered around, and everything looked the same.

  She took a deep breath as she walked upstairs, and when she passed Joey’s bathroom, she could see the towels still strewn on the hamper from the bath Maria gave the little boy last night before he went down to find his mommy.

  Jan had a desk in her room where she always sat to pay bills, and there was a small wicker filing cabinet next to it. Marly opened it and looked under W for will, but there wasn’t anything. Then she looked to see if there was a file marked “Legal Papers,” but there wasn’t. So she went through each letter of the alphabet, through contracts and a file on Jan’s sister’s expenses, and bills to pay, and Joey’s vaccination records, until finally she found what she wanted under M, because the lawyer’s last name was Middelman.

  She turned the pages until she came to Nomination of Guardians and scanned it quickly, “If it becomes necessary to appoint a guardian of the person or the estate of my minor child or children, I nominate my sister, Julie O’Malley, to serve as the guardian of the person and the estate of my minor child or children.” The sister who doesn’t even want to take Joey, Marly thought. What chance could he have being parented by someone who didn’t want him? Why hadn’t Jan, so sensitive about everything, understood that was the case? There were more papers and documents but there was no durable power of attorney for health care. Julie would have to make that decision, too.

  When Ellen opened the door to her house, the cats meowed around her ankles in a frantic circle of fur. She went right to the pantry for the cans of cat food and stood at the can opener feeling them rubbing against her and purring. The sound of the can opener made her head pound. As soon as “the beasts,” which was what her mother called them, were facedown in their bowls of food, she threw off her clothes, pulled on a nightshirt, and crashed into a deep and headachy sleep.

  When she woke a few hours later, her head was still throbbing, and she staggered into her kitchen, noticing what she hadn’t when she’d come in earlier. That there were twenty-nine messages on her answering machine.

  She listened to every one of the twenty-nine and jotted down the names and numbers of the ones she had to return. “Ellen, this is Lindsay in Mr. Bibberman’s office.” Bibberman’s secretary was on the tape six times. It was Saturday. Bibberman’s secretary worked the same seven-day-a-week schedule as her boss. She was aggressive, ambitious, and knew she was giving up having a personal life as long as she worked for him.

  “Alex,” Ellen said when he took her return call. “If you’re wondering about the meeting on Monday with Jodie Foster, I’ll be a thousand percent ready for it. I’ll see you there at nine sharp.”

  “Fine,” was all he said, and he put down the phone.

  Try to warm up your act a little, you putz, she thought. Not one concerned question about Jan. Not one drop of sympathy. “What did you expect?” she said out loud as she took a can of coffee out of the freezer. “You’re in the meanest town in the world, in the most competitive business, with the biggest bunch of insecure maniacs who ever lived. You thought maybe there would be an ‘Ahhh, poor baby.’ Grow up.”

  While the coffee perked, she looked down at the rest of the list of people she had to call back and systematically returned them one at a time. When she came to the call from her pool man, a message she’d listened to so sleepily she couldn’t remember now what he’d said, she decided to play it back and listen to it again on the machine.

  “Hi, Mrs. Bass. I told that lady who was sitting at your pool this morning that I might not be able to come back today, but I got lucky on my lunch break and found that part for your filter. So I’ll try and get by at around two or three. See ya.”

  She looked at the clock and it was two forty-five, then out the back window and there in fact was Eddie, her cute hunk of a pool man, just arriving, with that fucking boom box playing so loud that when she opened the window, the music made her think her head would explode. What did he mean when he said that he told something to a lady who was sitting at her pool?

  It wasn’t Constanza, the cleaning lady. She came in on Mondays and Fridays and she wouldn’t dream of sitting out at the pool. Ellen shouted to Eddie, a yell to be heard over the music so she could get his attention. When he came to the window, she asked him about the lady. But the only detail he remembered about her was a giant striped purse he nearly tripped over a few times.

  Why would anybody be sitting at her pool? That was impossible. Maybe Eddie had seen a lady at somebody else’s pool and confused it with hers. A big striped purse?

  Marly drove home from Jan’s trying to remember the books she’d read about children and divorce, because the same principles of dealing with loss had to apply to Joey. Keep the dialogue going, acknowledge your own feelings of helplessness and fear. No question is too silly, no fear is wrong. If you have trouble with an answer, it’s okay to tell them, “I’m not sure what to say to that, but I’ll think about it.”

  As she drove west on Sunset, Marly called Sabrina Kleier, a child psychologist she’d visited several times after Billy first moved out. She was surprised when Sabrina herself picked up instead of a service. When Marly told her what had happened, the young child psychologist told her, “Find any photographs you have of Jan and go through them with Joey, talk about Jan’s life, their life together, and how much she loves him. If you have photos of the adoption, take those out and show those to him. Maybe that will open some dialogue about how afraid he was when he found her.”

  When she opened her front door, the house was quiet. She walked from the door to the kitchen, trying to relive how it felt only yesterday making that same walk with Billy. She looked wistfully at the banquette, remembering the heat of their lovemaking, and then his tender words last night. He seemed to mean it all. But then he was a man who was paid millions to persuade America that he was sweet and boyish every night of the week.

  She could hear squeals of laughter from the swimming pool, and when she walked outside, she saw her housekeeper and Jan’s housekeeper, poolside as lifeguards, while the twins and Joey played in the water. Jennifer hoisted herself out of the pool and ran to Marly. “Is Joey going to be ours if Aunt Janny dies?” Jennifer asked.

  Marly gave her a look that meant, “Don’t say that!” and Jennifer said, “Sorry, Mom.”

  Joey waved from the water, where Sarah was pulling him around in a Donald Duck inner tube, and Marly went over to the pool and lay on her stomach so her face hung over the edge. Sarah floated the inner tube close to the edge, and both she and Joey gave Marly a tiny wet kiss on the cheek. She was relieved to see that he seemed to be having a good time.

  “I’m going up to grab a shower and a few hours’ sleep,” she said. When she stood in the shower with the phone on the floor next to it and the shower door open in case Rose called from the hospital, she was shaking. When she finally pulled the curtains closed in her bedroom, got into bed and dozed off, she was awakened by Joey’s screams. “I want Mommmmeeeee. My Mommm
eeee.”

  Jennifer burst into her room. “Mom, he’s doing it again. He’s been screaming like that all night and day. When we took him in the water, he stopped for a little while, but he’s always screaming.” Marly put a robe on over her nightie and went downstairs, where the helpless Maria held the red-faced, agonized little boy.

  “Let’s talk about Mommy,” Marly said to him. “Let’s go get out the photo albums and talk about Joey’s Mommy.”

  “Mommeee,” Joey wailed, and Marly’s heart ached for him.

  The minute Ellen got back to the hospital to sit by Jan’s bed, Rose left for home. Molly was at her play date and Andy was making rounds, and the house was silent. She was past sleep, so she walked into her messy office and tried to tidy up the papers. To sort them out. After plowing through a few of the piles, she found herself sitting on the floor, unmoving, in that daze that comes with the kind of broken sleep they’d all had last night. Her eyes scanned the photos on the cork board around her desk. The one at Marly and Billy’s wedding where they were all laughing with their heads thrown back in joy!

  When the phone jangled, she could feel it in her trembling body.

  “Rosie.”

  “Marty, it’s Saturday,” she said to her agent.

  “I tried to get you last night, but your daughter said you were out, and I really have to talk some sense into you.”

  “Why is that?” Rose asked. She was too numb to do her usual jokey exchange with him. Now she was looking at a picture of Molly and Sarah and Jennifer and Roger, at a Mother’s Day picnic Ellen had thrown in her backyard. They were all in Ellen’s pool, the little girls hanging on a grinning Roger, who was about seventeen at the time and still willing to come to parties with his mother’s friends and their daughters.

  “Because Howard Bergman told me you walked out of the meeting with him. Could that possibly be true?”

  “It could possibly be,” Rose said.