by Sloane Tanen
Absently, Ed took a silver letter opener out of the penholder on his desk and stroked its edges. “I think you did the best you could under the circumstances. You were a good father, Marty.”
“Yes, Ed. I was a good father. I worked my ass off for my family. I never got a handout from anybody along the way. I started at the bottom. Not one fucking favor from anybody.”
“I know that. Nobody is questioning the—”
“When do I get to enjoy myself? When do I get to relax?” Marty heard himself echoing Gail’s sentiments.
“You were in Mexico with Gail over Christmas.” Ed raised his eyebrows. “A thirty-thousand-dollar week.”
“Should we have stayed at a Motel Six?” Marty said, his voice rising. “Is that the kind of thing you’re advising me to do?”
“I’m just asking that you scale it back. The dinners, the gifts, the vacations. You’re too generous,” Ed said. “I’m sure Gail would sympathize with your situation. Who wouldn’t understand a man’s desire to leave something for his own children? His grandchildren?”
Both Marty and Ed knew that Gail would understand no such thing. There was a long silence. Marty’s hand wandered to the base of the Nautilus lamp and ran over the cool bronze metal. Ed followed Marty’s hand with his eyes before reaching across the desk and covering it with his own.
“So?” Ed asked. “What do you want to do?”
Something about the kindness of Ed’s gesture, the spontaneity of the question, threw Marty. Ed was indeed appealing to Marty’s better nature. But Marty didn’t feel like being better! He felt like doing what he wanted. And doing what he wanted now meant spending the remainder of his money the way he chose to spend it. He resented Ed’s intimacy, his simplification of things, as if following some moral compass led to happiness.
“Marty?” Ed said.
“Would you lay off?” Marty shouted, surprising both of them. Just then the moisture on his upper lip dissolved into a familiar metallic taste inside his mouth. He had a bloody nose again. “Fuck!” he said, wiping his lip with the back of his hand and seeing the evidence.
Ed pushed a box of tissues at him and looked away, embarrassed. “I can’t do this anymore,” Ed said. “We’ve known each other a long time. I love you. But I can’t do this.”
“That’ll do me fine, Ed, because you’re fired.”
Ed looked at Marty and blinked slowly.
Marty shoved a wadded tissue up his nostril, stood, and walked out of Ed’s office with as much poise as he could muster.
He stopped in Lynn’s small office on the way out and leaned down to plant a dry kiss on her withered cheek. “Good luck to you.”
“What happened, Mr. Kessler?” she asked, staring up at him with her bottom lip trembling. She looked back toward Ed’s office, as though beseeching him to come after Marty. After all, they’d argued before, though never at such a decibel level.
“Lynn,” Marty said. “You’re a great dame.”
She stood up. Two tears rolled down her cheeks and settled into the parched crevices of her lined face. Ed wasn’t coming.
“Please have my portfolio sent to Jim Keating at Sullivan, Gifford, Doutré, and Keating,” Marty said in a voice loud enough for Ed to hear.
A tiny gasp escaped before Lynn closed her mouth and nodded.
Every new lover meant the severing of old ties. Still, losing Ed Rothstein was a big one. He trusted Ed. He loved Ed. Jim Keating was an asshole. You had to be half cracked, Marty thought, to entrust your finances to an Irishman. But Gail would be delighted. Jim Keating was her lawyer, and the money manager at SGDK had done well for her. She’d been on Marty for months to switch.
He fished a handful of pills out of his pocket and dry-swallowed two of them on the escalator. He wasn’t sure which was which, but he didn’t see much difference between a Xanax, a Valium, and a Klonopin. They all helped take the edge off when what he really needed was a hit. Gail pulled up in his Mercedes the moment he walked outside. Did she have a goddamn tracking system on him? He got in and slammed the door.
“Why do you have a tissue hanging out of your nose?” she asked him.
“Bloody nose. I forgot,” he said, gently pulling the Kleenex out and revisiting the past few moments with a bit less satisfaction. “It’s nothing.”
Gail gave him the look that said, I’m concerned about your health, your drug problem, and your financial portfolio, all in a single glance. “Well?” she asked, trying to raise a Botoxed eyebrow. “How’d it go?”
“Let’s see what Jim can do for me.”
“No! Really?”
Marty could see she was genuinely surprised. Nobody expected Marty to leave Ed. Leaving Ed meant Gail had made more progress in six months than all the other women put together had made in forty years.
He tapped the dashboard. “Let’s go eat,” he said. “I feel like pancakes.”
“Pancakes it is.” She wasn’t going to argue for the virtues of a healthy lunch. Not today. “There’s a new place on Santa Monica Boulevard that has a marvelous short stack with real maple syrup. Not the fake stuff.”
Marty nodded, welcoming the feathery high that washed over him like a warm bath. The world softened. Gail was a Rolodex of important yet superfluous information. If he squinted, and the sun was at just the right angle, she looked almost beautiful to him.
“And,” she said, obviously cheered by the events of the day, “I called our guy at the Barnes and Noble on Third and that new Alex Grecian novel you wanted is in. He’s holding it for us so we can stop by and pick it up after lunch.”
“Good,” Marty said, surprised that he felt comforted rather than irritated by Gail’s fastidious attentiveness. He closed his eyes and sighed, letting himself relax into the sunbaked warmth of the passenger seat. He could hear Gail chattering, but he wasn’t listening. He was allowing himself the length of the ten-minute drive to mourn the loss of his dear old friend.
Bunny
London
“Pathetic,” Bunny said. She was resting her forehead on the cold window of the black town car. “I’ll be in adult nappies and Ian will be wheeling me around to publicity events with an oxygen tank.”
Ian, sitting next to her in the backseat, cleared his throat.
“The reading is bad enough, but the Q and A,” she said with a snort. “My God, how many bloody books do I have to write before I can stop smiling at their idiotic, juvenile questions? ‘No, I don’t have a writing ritual.’ ‘No, I don’t have a favorite writer.’ ‘And no, I do not have any advice for you on how to become one.’”
“That’s lovely, Bun,” Ian said.
“‘Do you sit in a special chair?’” Bunny continued, perfectly mimicking the speech pattern of a thirteen-year-old girl. “A special chair?” She laughed to herself. “Do they think the place I plant my bottom trips some auto-write button? Where do people get their ideas?”
Ian didn’t say anything. He assumed, correctly, that the question was rhetorical.
“I’ll have Ian’s chub and balls in a nutcracker if anybody hugs me tonight,” she muttered at the window.
“I am sitting right here,” Ian said, shifting in the leather seat.
“I’m too old to pretend I’m still grateful,” she went on, ignoring Ian and watching the London streets whizzing by. She ran a hand through her hair and adjusted the trousers that had cost her fifteen hundred pounds. “My God, I’m a fat old yak.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Ian said. She knew she wasn’t fat. She just liked to say so.
Bunny reached into the pocket of her wide-legged slacks and pulled out the slim antique silver hip flask her ex-husband Sam had given her years ago. “Before he realized quite how much I’d appreciate it,” Bunny said with a snort.
“Bun?” Ian said. He took her free hand from her lap and loosened the fingers of her little fist. “You’re talking to yourself again.”
“Primrose Hill, Foyles, Pan, Dulwich,” Bunny went on, spitting out the names of the most
fashionable bookstores in London. “It’s such a bore with the obsequious store owners and the shopgirls treating me like I’m made of glass. I’m not that old.”
“It’s really about the readers,” Ian said. “Your fans.”
“My fans.” Bunny laughed, choked on some gin, and used the back of her hand to wipe away the spittle. She finally looked at Ian, almost surprised to find him sitting there. “Why are my fans so unattractive, Ian?”
“What’s that?”
“Why are those girls so dirty?” she asked. “Is filth a new fad? Even the boys resemble a grisly discovery one finds at the bottom of a bag of crisps. They’re all so wet-looking. Greasy.”
“Really, Bunny?” Ian folded his arms across his chest.
“Come, you must admit it. And they all want a hug, as if they think something other than Scotchgard might rub off on them.” Bunny paused, waited for Ian to respond. “Ian,” Bunny snapped. “Are you listening to me?”
“Am I listening to you complain about being adored, rich, and famous?” he asked. “Yes, I’m listening. And yes, everyone is filthy. Very, very filthy.”
Bunny turned back to the window. “Someone’s in a piss mood today.” She took a deep drink.
“I’m not the one raging,” he said. “Or going on a pub crawl right here in the car.”
“Oh!” Bunny said, laughing. “Agent Ian is worried about my drinking again. Poor Ian. It’s hard to wrangle the beasts. Prop up the pissed authors and make them appear human for an hour or so.” Bunny loved Ian precisely because he wasn’t afraid of her. Still, she thought he could be a touch more deferential sometimes.
“Bunny, darling, if you’re not talking to yourself, then please stop referring to me in the third person. It upsets me. If you are talking to yourself, then please stop drinking because, yes, I am a little worried.”
“About the reading?”
“About you.”
“Piss off,” she said and handed Ian the flask containing her latest passion: Nolet’s Reserve Dry Gin.
Ian sniffed the bottle. He shuddered. “You know I don’t like gin unless it’s mingling with schnapps in an apple martini.”
“This isn’t Beefeater,” she said. “It’s very supple.”
Bunny had recently switched over from Cabernet Sauvignon to the flagship Nolet’s. The spirit was an indulgence at six hundred pounds a bottle but it made her very cheerful and left her clearheaded the next morning. Even Ian could see the flask’s peculiar sex appeal. Still, cheerful wasn’t the adjective he would have chosen to describe its effect on Bunny’s moods, and while she might have felt clearheaded the next morning, anyone on the receiving end of her hostility felt decidedly hungover.
“Crap, it tastes like petrol.” He winced.
“You get used to it,” she said as the car pulled up in front of Primrose Hill. Hundreds of people were standing in line outside, and the bookshop itself was packed.
“Brilliant,” Ian said, smiling. “They do love you. Now be nice.” He took another small sip from the flask, gasped, and handed it back. “It must please you a little that after all these years, they still can’t get enough of you.”
“I’m chuffed to bits,” Bunny said. She took another pull and slid the bottle back into her pocket. “Off we go, then.”
“And please don’t have a pop at anyone, right?” he called after her.
“Right,” she said, pushing the door open and smiling at Mr. Toadenfroad or whatever the hell his name was.
Janine
In the 1980s, famous kids didn’t go to summer camp. Janine had no idea what they did from June through August, but they didn’t roast s’mores in the country with ordinary children. Most of the stage kids had parents who were dedicated to entertaining their breadwinners in the off-season. Janine had no such luck. Her father was at the height of his career. Her mother, empowered by alimony and her newfound sexual freedom, was busy distracting herself from the sour stench of time passing.
The first season of Janine’s sitcom, Family Happens, had gotten so-so ratings, and the network was still debating whether to bring the show back. Janine’s agent had tried to land her a small television role that summer, something for her to do until the fate of the show was decided, but all anyone could see was li’l Jenny Bailey. One unexceptional season and she was already an icon of teen spirit and banana clips. Not a director in town could get beyond it. Nobody ever would, but Janine didn’t know that at the time.
Faced with the prospect of a summer involving actual parenting, Janine’s mother, Pamela, decided that it was time Janine re-immersed herself in the world of regular kids. After years of making sure Janine was perceived as special, Pamela suddenly announced that her daughter needed a crash course in being ordinary. “You can’t expect me to babysit a twelve-year-old girl loafing around all summer,” Janine had heard her mom yell at her father over the phone. And so they agreed that Janine would go to Camp Shasta for four weeks, and she’d get there by taking the seven-hour bus ride to Mendocino with the other campers.
Janine was anxious about it, but going seemed like a better option than spending the summer listening to her little sister, Amanda, brag about landing “a movie role” as a psych-hospital patient in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 or, worse, staring at her mother’s friends getting high and skinny-dipping at the Laurel Canyon house the three of them had moved into after the divorce three years earlier.
Janine said yes but only on the condition that she could go to camp incognito. This part was exciting and she was surprised that her parents had agreed to the idea.
“Are you going to wear a wig and dark glasses?” Amanda had asked as she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and practiced panicky scream faces.
“No, you stupid idiot,” Janine said, though the truth was she hadn’t worked out the details yet.
The Saturday before Janine left, her father took her to Big 5 Sporting Goods and the Army Surplus in Santa Monica with the camp’s list of recommended items. Marty would be damned if his daughter showed up without all seventy-six of them, including a neon poncho, a squat strap, and a couple of cans of Off with DEET.
“You think I should get a gas mask?” she asked, looking into the crowded shopping cart and hoping to make her dad laugh. “In case there’s an air raid while we’re kayaking?”
He wasn’t laughing. “That hair,” Marty said, shaking his head, agitated all over again that his ex-wife had allowed his daughter to dye her hair blond and get a perm. “You both went too far with this. You look like Sammy Hagar. And not in a good way.”
“Dad.”
“This whole charade is goddamn ridiculous. Your mother—”
“The hair was my idea. Please don’t be mad at Mom. Please.”
Janine knew that the charade he’d referred to was less about her hair and more about her career. Never mind that her dad was one of Hollywood’s A-list producers. He’d always been adamant about keeping his own family a healthy distance from what he thought of as a fundamentally corrupt and immoral industry. The thought that his ex-wife could be so entirely indifferent to his feelings, to the point of sending his children on auditions behind his back, assuredly using his name to do it, never failed to enrage him.
He ground his teeth as he and Janine walked the musty aisles of sleeping bags and blankets. He was deep into some angry internal monologue involving his ex-wife and her scheming and childishness.
“Fuck that bottom-feeder Lou Webster!” he muttered, referring to the third-rate casting director Pam had been dating since they’d divorced. Lou had put Amanda in a commercial for a portable sandbox shaped like a turtle. Marty hadn’t known a thing about it. The details of how Lou had encouraged Pam to start taking pretty Amanda on auditions had emerged slowly over time. And while Amanda did land a few parts, it was Janine (dragged along because her mom didn’t know what else to do with her) who attracted attention with some off-color joke or waiting-room improv. Soon Janine, not Amanda, was cast in the Chuck E. Cheese commerc
ial eating fake pizza at a fake birthday party. And it was Janine, not Amanda, who started getting callbacks for real shows.
Janine had hated the secrecy, suspecting all along that her father would be furious, but who could blame her for wanting to please her impossible mother while simultaneously outshining the stunningly pretty sister Pam so clearly preferred? Janine never knew if it was the reflected glamour that her mother liked or the act of deceiving her ex-husband, but by the time she was cast in Family Happens, she didn’t care.
“I need a flashlight,” Janine said, looking at her father. He didn’t answer. She figured he was still busy chewing on the fact that his daughter felt she needed to wear a disguise to go to summer camp. “I need a flashlight, and stop worrying. I’m fine.”
She knew he secretly hoped the show would get canceled, that he believed her immediate disappointment would fade and then she wouldn’t have to spend her life feeling like a freak because she’d peaked young. “These things don’t ever end well,” he’d shouted (along with a lot of other things) when he finally found out about her being cast in the show.
He drove Janine home in his Jeep Cherokee, its trunk loaded with camp supplies. Usually their car rides were jokey and animated, but their moods were nicked by the awareness that they wouldn’t see each other for a whole month. “I’m sorry I can’t take you to the bus Monday.” His chin was trembling the way it always did when he was trying not to get emotional. “I’m proud of you,” he said, knocking on the dashboard. “It takes cojones to leave home for the first time. And the hair’s not that bad, really.”
Janine tried not to think about how much she’d miss him. She didn’t say anything until she was sure the lump in her throat wouldn’t give her away.
The next day, Maria, her dad’s housekeeper, came by to help Janine pack everything into her camp trunk. Janine carefully wrote her “name” on the luggage tag: Amy Tanner. Screw anyone who insisted she was anyone else. Yes, she’d say when asked, she did bear an uncanny resemblance to that actress Janine Kessler. She heard it all the time. Chip McNamara, the camp director, had agreed to the terms. He’d also offered her the position of junior counselor in the drama department but she’d said no. She just wanted to be Amy. Amy Tanner, age twelve. A nobody.