by Laura Levine
“So, sweetie. Tell Uncle Rocky what you want.”
Oh, well. As long as I was here, why not go through with it? After all, what did I have to lose—other than my appetite?
“Actually, I need somebody to be my fiancé at a wedding.”
“Oh. I get it,” he said with a most appalling wink. “You’re the bride. He’s the groom. A little game of Honeymoon Hotel, huh?”
“No, that’s not it. I want somebody to pretend to be my fiancé at a real wedding.”
“No hanky-panky?”
“No hanky-panky.”
“Well, that’s a new one,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “When you see the guys I’ve got on file, maybe you’ll change your mind. Scandinavian Studs. Latin Lovers. Denzel Washington look-alikes. I got ’em all. Here, let me show you.”
He hustled over to a battered file cabinet and pulled out some files.
“Gorgeous, huh?” he said, handing me an 8 x 10 glossy of one of his escorts.
Rocky did not lie. The guy was gorgeous. Forty years ago when the faded picture had no doubt been taken. By now he was probably showing up for dates on a walker.
“Or how about Alonzo?” he said, flashing another photo in front of me. “Ignore those numbers on the bottom. I’m just using his mug shot until his professional photos are ready.”
“Actually, Rocky, I’m not sure this is such a good idea.”
“Don’t be silly, sweetheart. Of course it is. All the top movie stars come to Miss Emily when they want a date. Cameron. Julia. Angelina. And politicians, too. You ever hear of Maggie Thatcher?”
“The ex-prime minister of Great Britain?”
He nodded solemnly. “I can’t say any more. I’ve signed a secrecy agreement. Let’s just say that Maggie was one hot crumpet!”
Okay, this had been a mistake. Major mistake. I’d just tell Patti the truth, that I was single and manless and quite happy, thank you very much, to be living alone and single with my cat.
And I was just about to do so when the door opened and in walked Francois.
Actually, his name turned out to be Brad, but I swear, he was a neurosurgeon fiancé straight out of central casting. Tall and slim, with a mane of thick black hair and the chiseled cheekbones of a runway model. True, he wasn’t the kind of guy I’d fall for in real life. In real life, I tend to go for sweet and vulnerable as opposed to drop-dead gorgeous. But this wasn’t real life. This was a lie I was living. Of monumental proportions. I might as well go for broke and show up at the wedding with a stunner. Patti and Denise would swoon in their size 2s when they saw him.
“I’ll take that one,” I blurted out, like I was choosing a cookie at Mrs. Fields. “How much?”
“Oh, Brad.” Rocky’s smile got a whole lot oilier. “He’s top of the line. He’s three hundred.”
“Three hundred dollars?” I gulped. That was about $250 more than I’d planned to spend.
“An hour,” he added. “First hour in advance.”
Aw, what the heck? This guy looked like he was worth it. I could do it under an hour. I’d have him meet me at the wedding, introduce him to Patti, and then make some excuse about why we had to leave.
I turned to Brad.
“Do you think you could pass yourself off as a doctor?”
“Of course,” he said, beaming me a most winning smile. “I’m an actor.”
Thank heavens this was Los Angeles, where nine out of ten beautiful people are actors!
I asked him a few questions about himself and he seemed to be able to string together a complete sentence with ease. In fact, he was a lot more articulate than most doctors I’d been to.
“So how about it, sweetheart?” Rocky grinned. “Do we have ourselves a deal?”
I got out my checkbook and started writing.
On my way home I stopped off at The Cookerie, a nose-bleed expensive kitchen supply store in Beverly Hills, to pick up a wedding gift for Patti. I chose the least expensive gift on her registry—a $90 corkscrew. Can you believe there are people in this world who spend ninety bucks for a corkscrew? Haven’t they ever heard of screw top wine?
A snooty blond salesclerk rang up my purchase.
“You’re giving this as a wedding gift? A crummy corkscrew?”
Okay, what she really said was Cash or Charge?, but I could read the subtitles.
But I didn’t care what she or anybody else thought of me. So what if my gift was the cheapest one at the wedding? My fiancé, at least, would be the hottest.
Chapter 6
I spent the next few days frantically faxing Patti different versions of the script. I rewrote Romeo and Juliet as Seinfeld and Elaine, as Ray and Debra Romano, as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Okay, I exaggerate. But not by much. Finally, when I was pulling out my hair at the roots, Patti told me she’d decided to go back to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English—that she wanted to be “true to the times.”
At this stage of the game I didn’t give a flying frisbee what this maniac wanted. I tossed a few “haths” and “thees” in my original script and faxed it to her. Five minutes later she called me, and miracle of miracles: She actually liked it. I was free at last!
Well, not quite.
“I want you to come the wedding rehearsal tomorrow,” she commanded, “in case there are any last-minute tweaks.”
Oh, for crying out loud. Enough was enough. No way was I going to her stupid wedding rehearsal. With all the versions of the scripts I’d sent her, I’d more than earned my salary. If she wanted any tweaks, she could write them herself. I’d just tell her No, plain and simple.
Yeah, right. You know me, the original spineless wonder. The words that actually came out of my mouth were, “Sure, Patti. No problem.”
When I stepped out onto the Devane patio the next day, the air was filled with the sounds of hammering and power drills. I looked over and saw a small army of workmen installing a massive party tent on the grounds behind the pool.
Off to the side, on the velvety green lawn beneath the balcony, a few rows of white wooden folding chairs had been set up for the wedding rehearsal. And scattered across the lawn were those statues of Cupid Patti said she’d be ordering—chubby marble cherubs with bare bottoms and arrows poised in the air.
Which just goes to show that all the money in the world can’t buy good taste.
Denise was sitting on one of the folding chairs, chatting with the bridesmaid-for-hire, the lovely Swedish model I’d seen the other day. Cheryl sat next to them, having traded her polyester sweats for a polyester pantsuit, staring glumly into space. What, I wondered, was she doing here, after having been so unceremoniously banished from the wedding party?
Across the aisle, Dickie chatted with a stunning man, a bronzed Adonis of breathtaking proportions. For a fleeting instant, I wondered if Patti had ordered a best man to go with her bridesmaid-for-hire.
Seated next to Dickie was a middle-aged couple. I could tell right away they were his parents. Mainly because I heard him call them “Mom” and “Dad.”
Dickie’s father was an older version of Dickie. Same wide smile, same lanky physique. His mother, a stocky woman with a round face and thick, blunt-cut, graying hair, sat with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her jaw clenched. Like Cheryl, she did not seem to be the happiest of campers.
I started across the lawn to join the wedding party when Patti suddenly came storming out of the tent, followed by her mother and stepfather.
“This is impossible!” she screamed, heading in my direction.
Oh, phooey. She wasn’t happy with the script! Bridezilla wanted another rewrite.
I seriously considered turning around and making a break for it, to hell with the three grand, when I heard her whine:
“Damn those workmen. They should’ve been finished hours ago. We can’t have a rehearsal with that racket going on.”
Her stepfather put a comforting arm around her. “Now, honey,” I heard him say, “the guys are almost done. They’ll be gone before
you know it.”
“Yes, don’t be such a drama queen,” her mother said.
“Look who’s talking,” Patti snapped. “You have a fit if your Botox shots are five minutes late.”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” her mother said. “They’re not Botox shots. They’re allergy injections!”
“In your forehead?”
“C’mon, girls.” Her stepfather stepped between them, eager to avert a battle. “Let’s say hello to Dickie’s parents.”
By now the three of them were standing just inches away from me. I froze in position, like a squirrel caught poaching a tomato, afraid Patti would notice me and spew her spleen in my direction.
But fortunately Patti’s attention had now shifted to Dickie’s mom.
“Damn that Eleanor,” she hissed, staring at the stocky woman with the blunt cut hair. “She’s still got that repulsive mole on her face. I told her to have it removed for the wedding photos, but did she do it? Nooo. She left it on, just to spite me.”
Good heavens. Patti had actually asked her prospective mother-in-law to have a mole removed for the wedding! If nothing else, that alone secured her a place of honor in the Bridezilla Hall of Fame.
“Well, I’m not going to put her picture in the album,” she pouted. “I refuse to have moles in my wedding memories.”
“Be reasonable, Patti,” her stepfather said. “You can’t expect somebody to have plastic surgery just for your wedding.”
“And why the hell not? I did.”
“Don’t try to reason with her, Conrad,” her mother said. “She’s impossible.”
“Now, Daphna,” he chided his wife, “Patti’s under a lot of stress. C’mon, Patti, honey. Let’s go talk to the Potters. You’ve got to, sooner or later.”
“Oh, all right.”
And so the happy family made their way to their future in-laws.
I was just allowing myself to breath normally again when I saw Veronica hurrying out from the tent.
“Hi,” she said, trotting to my side. “I was checking out the tent for tomorrow when Hurricane Patti whirled in.”
“Would you believe she asked Dickie’s mom to have a mole removed for the wedding photos?”
“That’s nothing. She asked the florist to spray perfume on the flowers to make them smell rosier.”
“Amazing.”
“Have you met Reverend Gorgeous yet?” Veronica nodded in the direction of the bronze Adonis I’d seen earlier, now chatting with Patti’s mom.
“That’s the minister?” I blinked in disbelief.
“I run into him all the time. He does all the celebrity weddings.”
“I’ll bet it’s Standing Room Only at his sermons.”
Daphna Devane was flirting with him shamelessly, practically throwing her panties at him, totally oblivious to her husband. I could picture Patti, in ten years time—heck, in ten minutes time—doing the same thing in front of Dickie.
“Well, I’d better make tracks,” Veronica said, “before Patti sees me and decides she wants to change the menu again.”
I watched with envy as she hurried off to freedom, then slipped into the last row of folding chairs.
Patti had wormed her way between Dickie and his mom. She sat with her back to her future mother-in-law, pointedly ignoring her, whispering in Dickie’s ear, passing the time until the hammering stopped.
At last it did, and workmen began streaming out of the tent.
“Look, Patti,” Conrad said. “They’re leaving.”
“It’s about time,” Patti huffed, getting up. “Let’s get this show on the road. Is everybody here?”
She looked around, and her face clouded over.
“Where the hell is the best man?”
At that very moment, as if on cue, a skinny shrimp of a guy came running out of the house.
“Walter!” Patti screeched. “Where the hell have you been?”
Oh, gulp. It was Walter Barnhardt. Dickie’s best friend from Hermosa High. I should’ve guessed he’d be Dickie’s best man. They’d been buddies since kindergarten.
I slumped down in my seat, hoping Walter wouldn’t spot me. All through high school, he had the most unshakable crush on me. I’d find him lurking in stairwells between classes waiting for me to appear. The minute he saw me, he’d cling to me like a human fungus, regaling me with the latest news flashes from his math club or chem lab.
He was constantly asking me to his house to see his ant farm, and I was constantly telling him that he was a very nice guy but I wasn’t interested. After a while, I started leaving out the part about him being a nice guy, but that didn’t stop him.
Now he was stammering excuses to Patti about being held up in traffic.
“Oh, who cares why you’re late?” she snapped, cutting him off. “I’m going up to the balcony.”
As Patti hurried into the house, Walter crept to a seat next to Dickie, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank goodness he hadn’t seen me.
A few pleasant Patti-less minutes passed, and then she made her appearance on the balcony.
“Okay, I’m ready,” she hollered down. “Let’s do it!”
Dickie got up and stood next to one of the cupids on the lawn below her.
“Stand closer to the statue, honey,” Patti cooed from above. “It symbolizes our undying love.”
Where’s a barf bag when you need one?
They proceeded to recite my bowdlerized balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, wherein Patti gets the brilliant idea to get married here and now, thereby doing away with those pesky extra acts of the original play. Then she leaned over and blew her beloved a kiss to seal the deal. Minutes later, she came skipping out of the house and embraced Dickie for a big steamy smacker.
When they finally came up for air, she glared at her ragtag audience.
“You’re supposed to be applauding.”
As we clapped feebly, she and Dickie made their way up the aisle, where they then proceeded to come right back down again—Dickie with his mom, Patti with her stepfather.
Finally, flanked by their wedding party, the happy couple stood before the minister to the stars and ran through their actual wedding vows, a treacly bit of pap written by Patti that made the scribes at Hallmark look like Ezra Pound.
At last the rehearsal was over, and I began easing my way toward the house. I was determined to make my escape before Patti could ambush me with any surprise “tweaks.”
I didn’t get very far when I heard someone calling my name. I turned and saw Patti’s stepfather hurrying to my side.
“We haven’t been formally introduced,” the dashing sixtysomething said. “I’m Conrad Devane. I just wanted to tell you what a wonderful job you did on the script.”
“Thank you.”
At last. Someone in the family had said something pleasant to me.
“I hope Patti wasn’t too demanding,” he said with an apologetic smile.
Not any more than your average third-world despot.
“Not at all,” I managed to lie.
“Please don’t hurry off. We’re having a little cocktail party before the rehearsal dinner, and we’d love you to join us.”
And put myself in Patti’s line of fire? Not on your life.
“No, thank you. I couldn’t possibly. I’m not dressed for a party.”
“Don’t worry about that. Everyone’s going to be casual.”
“No, really, I can’t.”
“You don’t want to miss out on any of Veronica’s delicious hors d’oeuvres, do you?”
Oh, damn. Why did he have to go and mention hors d’oeuvres? Along with appetizers, en-trées, side dishes, and desserts, hors d’oeuvres happen to be one of my favorite food courses.
“I tasted her crab-stuffed mushrooms,” he said, “and they’re out of this world.”
Crab-stuffed mushrooms? C’mon, I’m only human.
So, throwing caution—and sanity—to the winds, I said, “Sure, why not?”
I was about to find out exactly why not, because just then I saw Walter Barnhardt sprinting across the lawn to join us.
“Jaine!” he beamed. “I thought that was you!”
Poor Walter. Whereas Dickie had blossomed into a studmuffin, Walter had remained firmly entrenched in the Valley of the Nerds. If anything, he’d grown nerdier. His ears seemed to stick out farther than they had in high school, as did his teeth. And to top things off—literally—he was sporting the ghastliest wig I’d ever seen outside of a Halloween party.
“Are you staying for cocktails?” he asked.
“Of course she is,” Conrad said. “She just told me she would.”
“Super!” Walter said, eyeing me like a starving dog who’s just been handed a T-bone.
Chapter 7
It turns out I had totally misjudged Walter. I just assumed by the creepy way he’d clung to me like lichen in high school that he was a painfully awkward geekazoid. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Now that I finally got a chance to talk with him, I discovered he was a painfully obnoxious geekazoid.
The guy never shut up. He had me trapped in a dim corner of the party, blocking my escape, while he rattled on about his colorful life as an insurance actuary.
I tried not to stare at the god-awful nest of hair perched on his head like a dead hamster. I wondered if it had come with a rabies shot.
“Want to know your odds of getting killed by decapitation?” he asked cheerfully.
“Who doesn’t?”
Having failed to detect the irony in my reply, he was off and running with a bunch of gruesome statistics. Actually, at this point, the idea of death by decaptitation was beginning to have a certain appeal. At the very least, it would put an end to this conversation.
What really got me was that while I was trapped with the Human Actuarial Table, I could see Veronica and her wait staff circulating around the room with trays of divine smelling hors d’oeuvres. I tried to signal them, but they didn’t notice me tucked away in this godforsaken corner.
At last, Walter stopped yapping about his job and flashed me what he probably thought was a sexy grin.
“So, Jaine. I don’t see any ring on your finger. I guess that means you must be single.”