Now that he was emceeing a monthly showcase for comedians on one of the cable channels, he was hot, and making big money. He headlined at the best of the big clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and the owners of the smaller comedy clubs that had begun springing up all over the country were begging his manager for bookings.
He was riding the crest of an exploding demand for comedians, and he deserved the rewards. If he played too hard—way too hard—at least he worked hard, too. He was a workaholic nomad. People in the business said that Jay Leno was the only big name who traveled more. Most comedians dreamed of being successful enough to quit the road, yet Jay and Elliot thrived on it.
But Amy had met Jay, and Jay was a quiet, mellow person with none of Elliot’s manic traits. And compared to Elliot, he was a homebody. Elliot didn’t even own a home. He didn’t have a car. He said frequently that he had his work, and he had her, and that was enough. She knew that he had his booze and his dope, too, but she did her best to fight them.
Amy had learned a lot about her own strength and confidence during the past year. She made a great nursemaid behind the scenes. It was a trait that bolstered her value at the television station. Being a producer at WAZF meant doing a lot of mother-hen work. She was proud of her ability to protect Elliot more than anyone else could, even his doting, indulgent parents.
She steered him to an airport café and got him a large carton of milk. He sipped from it obediently as they walked out of the terminal, then handed her the empty container when a group of people recognized him and asked for autographs. Amy hailed a cab and tossed her bag in the backseat. She glanced at her wristwatch and marked five minutes, knowing that Elliot would get restless if she let his fans adore him too long. When time was up she angled through the crowd and reminded him that he had a meeting to attend.
Elliot gave the crowd a resigned look. “This lady keeps my appointments. Sometimes she even makes me go to them.”
He wrapped his arm around her as they made their way to the cab. Amy enjoyed the attention, though she was no longer awed by her status as Elliot’s girlfriend. It was impossible to keep a man on a pedestal once you’d been privy to most of his bodily functions. Even in the most routine moments of his day Elliot loved an audience. As far as he was concerned, she ought to be impressed by his special talents. For one thing, he produced more gas than the Alaskan pipeline.
At the hotel he flopped on the bed and pulled her down with him. “Showtime, baby,” he said with sloe-eyed lechery, his face tired but flushed with excitement. “I’ve got the microphone set up for you already.”
Warmth and need slid through her, but she tweeked his nose. “I don’t do requests.”
“Do whatever you want. I’m helpless.”
“Hopeless, you mean.” She undressed him hurriedly, touching his lean, lightly haired body with appreciative hands, knowing that her happiness with Elliot came from acccepting each moment without question. When she finished removing his clothes he rolled on top of her. “I think one of us is still dressed, and it’s ruining my good time.”
“So undress me.”
“How? You’ve got a man on top of you.”
“Use those big floppy things at the ends of your arms.” Mashed pleasantly beneath him, Amy wrapped her legs around his hips. His body was hard and inviting between her thighs; his smile held genuine affection as he began unbuttoning her jacket.
She looked forward to spending the next two days in bed with him. Even more, she looked forward to spending the next two nights at the club with him, where she could absorb the magic that made people laugh.
Atlanta Talks was taped on Friday afternoon at four. At quarter past one Dan Chapman called, frantic. He was a fatuous ex-weatherman and he hosted the show. He’d been hit in the mouth by a baseball while coaching his grandson’s Little League practice. Amy learned later that he’d actually been punched by a taxi driver named Zbrowski, who had objected to one of Dan’s Polish jokes.
A substitute host was needed for the show, and Amy sought out Mary Beth. Amy explained the dilemma, then put her question bluntly. “How would you like to interview two plastic surgeons about thigh sucking?”
“Do I have to be nice to them?”
“No.”
“All right, I’ll do it.”
And so, at four o’clock on a windy spring afternoon, a phenomenon was born. Mary Beth poked, prodded, and slashed the two doctors until they were stammering in shock. By the time she finished with Dan Chapman’s golf buddies, they had not only been humbled into admitting the hazards and cosmetic complications of liposuction but had also impaled themselves on the issue of treating women like imperfect pieces of meat.
After the show aired on Sunday night, fifty-seven viewers called. Thirty-six demanded that Mary Beth host the show from then on; nineteen insisted that the station fire her; one reported that she and he had been sisters in a previous life, and one threatened to kill her.
WAZF had never had a bigger or more passionate response to an on-air talent. The next week Elizabeth Vandergard became the juicier Liz Vandergard, and Atlanta Talks with Liz moved to Monday mornings at ten, replacing reruns of Gilligan’s Island. Within two months it became WAZF’s most popular and profitable show. Amy and Mary Beth came up with topics that rivaled the network talk fests. Amy reasoned that Atlanta must have its own supply of bizarre, fascinating, and obnoxious people anxious to joust with Mary Beth on television. She was right. She found them. Mary Beth interviewed them. Sometimes they survived the interview with their dignity intact. Not often.
Within six months the station tripled the show’s budget and let Amy bring in a studio audience for the tapings. There were discussions of syndicating the program.
Amy reveled in the success and the raise that came with it. Mary Beth accepted celebrity as her due, and bought a racing-green Jaguar that her salary, even with her own raise, could not begin to support. Her latest boyfriend, a second-string running back for the Atlanta Falcons, paid off the car note as a present for Mary Beth’s twenty-sixth birthday.
Amy, after some thought, invested her extra money in a night course at Georgia State. She studied advanced French and began to plan a trip to Paris. She wasn’t going to search for Sebastien; this would simply be a vacation, she told herself.
Elliot complained about her plans. Why roam around France when she could spend time with him, in the clubs? He sulked for two weeks over the issue. When she finally threatened to strangle him he decided to be a good sport. He sent her a set of luggage with her monogram on each piece. He offered to pay for the whole trip—if she’d stay for only three days. She sent the luggage back and told him that she was paying her own way. Elliot was puzzled and angry.
In the back of her mind there was the tiny thought that perhaps, just perhaps, she would take a side trip to the Loire valley and find the winery Sebastien had bought, according to a piece on him she’d read in a Paris newspaper she bought regularly at a bookstore. There was certainly no harm in that. She squirreled money away and waited.
Amy woke as if by a sixth sense. Raising herself on one elbow, she shivered and pulled the blanket over her bare shoulders. So people in Minneapolis called this spring weather. Spring in the Arctic, maybe. And Elliot loved a cold room. He liked to burrow into his security blankets then wrap his arms and legs around her. She often felt as if she were smothering, an ugly sensation that made her wake sometimes in panic. But this time she woke because he was gone. Amy huddled under the blanket and squinted through the dark hotel suite at a strip of light at the base of the bathroom door.
The door shouldn’t be shut. Immediately suspicious, she pulled one of Elliot’s undershirts on and tiptoed across the room. Listening at the door, she heard sniffing sounds. A bleak feeling filled her stomach. She pounded the door with a fist. “Are you auditionin’ for a nose-spray commercial in there?”
There was sudden silence. Then Elliot sang out, “Yeah! And I just got the part!” From the noises that followed, she determined
that he was hiding his evidence. Fear brought cold perspiration to her forehead. When he opened the door he grinned down at her, naked, his brown hair disheveled and his eyes looking too blue, too bright. He pecked a forefinger toward the majestic erection that protruded from the base of his belly. “Check it out. All for you.”
She shoved past him and went to the shaving kit he’d left near the sink. A quick perusal turned up the vial of white powder. “Do you want to ruin yourself? I can put up with a lot of things, but not this. This is dangerous, Elliot.”
“Baby, sssh.” He came up behind her and stroked her shoulders. Their gazes met in the mirror over the sink. “I barely touch the stuff, baby. I swear.”
“Good Lord, you were using it in the middle of the night. Why?”
“I just wanted to give you a fun time.” He flashed a charming smile. “After the way I fell asleep when we got to the room, with my dick dead to the world, I thought—”
“I don’t want a fun time that way.” She took the vial, opened it, and flushed the contents down the toilet.
When she looked over her shoulder he was watching her with open-mouthed dismay. He snapped his mouth shut and shrugged. “That’s why I need you, baby. You look out for my best interests. Too much, sometimes.”
Tears slid down her cheeks. She slammed the empty vial into a trash can. “Do you want to end up like Belushi and a dozen other guys you’ve known?”
“Ah, baby, lighten up. Everybody who plays the road uses a little coke. All the travel, all the pressure … you know how tired I get. The coke is just a little dance I do with myself sometimes, to feel better.” He looked down at his fading arousal then pulled his face into exaggerated lines of distress. “Now look what you did. King Kong went back to sleep.”
“Elliot, promise me that you won’t use coke.” She faced him and clutched his hands. “I care about you, you overage delinquent. I worry about you.”
He took her in his arms and held her desperately. “You’re the only person who sends me postcards reminding me to take my vitamins. You’re the only one who tells me when I’m being an asshole. You’re the only one who understands how afraid I am, of so many goddamned things. Of not making it in the business. Of not being the best. Of being nobody. You understand. I’ve never said this before, but I love you. I mean it.”
Stunned, she stood rigid within his embrace. Finally she slumped against him. “I love you, too.” It was true in a fundamental way she didn’t want to examine closely.
He whispered against her ear, “No more coke. I promise.”
Amy shut her eyes and nodded, not believing him and not knowing what to do. For no logical reason she thought of her trip to France. The desire to go there, to escape, to be part of a fantasy, overwhelmed her. She decided to take the vacation even sooner than she’d planned. Her life was twisting in directions that frightened her, and for the moment, at least, she wanted to turn it toward the past.
The innkeeper gestured broadly, a long loaf of bread in one hand. She looked very Gallic in her distress. “Vous ne pouvez pas aller piqueniquer aujourd’hui. Il fait un temps de chien!”
Amy took a moment to decipher the impassioned words and was proud when she managed easily. She answered in halting but correct French that she couldn’t let the rainy weather cancel her outing because this was her last full day of vacation. She had to take the train back to Paris in the morning and then leave for America.
The woman grumbled maternally but wrapped the bread in plastic and placed it in a knapsack along with cheese and a small bottle of wine. Amy tucked her hair under the hood of a bright yellow raincoat and gazed anxiously out a kitchen window that framed a picturesque garden shrouded in mist. Why had she waited until the end of the week to make this excursion? Now the weather had turned cool and wet, and the prospect of riding a bicycle several miles in it seemed foolish.
But she knew that she couldn’t go home without seeing the estate that Sebastien had bought after he married. Of course, he had a home in Paris, too, and that was undoubtedly where he and his wife spent most of their time. The press covered his life in great detail. He was very famous now. Amy made some inquiries and learned the house was in an old, exclusive part of the city. She hadn’t visited it. Her pride, along with a sense of embarrassment, wouldn’t let her. She wasn’t going to lurk on the street outside Sebastien’s home like some kind of pitiful fanatic.
But she would allow herself to lurk outside his country château. Troubled, Amy glanced down at her oversized raincoat, borrowed from the innkeeper’s tall daughter. She felt ridiculous.
“You are having doubts,” the innkeeper said, watching her shrewdly. “Good. Don’t go. I’ll make you a cup of tea and we’ll eat some sweet biscuits with marmalade.”
Amy shook her head. As much as she disliked this compulsion, she wanted to give into it, to expel it by indulging it, just once. “A tout à l’heure. Merci.” Taking the knapsack, she hurried through a back door into the dreary morning.
Her heart in her throat, Amy brought the bike to a halt in front of a massive stone entrance flanked by walls of tall, sharp hedge. Through a filigreed iron gate a cobblestone drive wound along terraced slopes covered in tulips and hyacinths. In the distance, among perfect lawns and ancient groves of birch, stood a small but breathtaking chateau. Amy had read about it in a guidebook, but the description hadn’t warned her that she would feel so awed. So this was the country estate Sebastien had bought for his wife.
Staring at the chateau’s round white towers capped with spires, the peacock perched lazily atop a stone fountain, and the vineyards stretching along the hills beyond the main grounds, the last of her fantasies crumpled. They mocked her for thinking that she had ever been an important part of Sebastien’s world.
Trembling, she reached under her slicker and opened the nylon bag attached to the belt of her jeans. She removed a large pair of sunglasses and covered her eyes. Pulling rain-dampened hair over her forehead, she tried fervently to disguise herself. There was almost no chance that Sebastien was here, but still.…
“Bonjour,” a scratchy voice called to Amy from somewhere in the tall shrubbery near the gate.
Amy jumped. A stout woman emerged carrying a woven basket filled with cut flowers. She wore a clear plastic raincoat over a stern black dress; a uniform, Amy guessed.
“Bonjour,” she responded. “Pardon, s’il vous plait Je reviens tout de suite.”
“Ah. American. I recognize the accent.”
“Yes. A tourist. Do you mind if I stand here for a minute and look at the château? It’s so beautiful.”
“We don’t give tours here.”
“I know. I just want to stay at the gate.”
The woman stepped closer, studying her. “Of course, you are welcome to look through the gate. You must be very dedicated to make your tour on a day such as this. But why are you wearing those glasses?”
“Uhmmm, I have an eye condition. My eyes are sensitive to the light.”
“You are so young to have such a thing. Are you a student?”
“No. I work for a television station as a producer. I’m here on vacation.” Feeling awkward, she nodded toward the basket of flowers. “Are you a gardener here?”
The woman laughed merrily. “I might as well be, I come out here so often. No, I am the head housekeeper.”
Amy took a deep breath. “The people who own the vineyard … do they actually live here?”
“They live in Paris, but they visit frequently. They’re here now. But they’re getting ready to drive back.” The housekeeper cocked her head toward the chateau. “I hear an automobile engine. Perhaps they are leaving now.”
Amy’s breath evaporated. Her heart raced and she felt dizzy. Here. He was here, close by. She, too, heard the car engine. Fear and elation washed over her. Sebastien mustn’t know that she was here. It would be too humiliating for her. But if only she could see him, get just a glimpse of him.…
“Move from the gate, please,” the h
ousekeeper told her.
“Sure.” Stepping with numb precision, Amy wheeled the bike into the tall grass a dozen feet away. She was standing in a ditch before she realized it, with a puddle of water creeping inside her cloth walking shoes.
But her attention was riveted to the gate, which slid back on both sides with majestic slowness when the housekeeper reached inside a control box and pushed a button. The approaching car seemed to take forever. Amy strained her eyes, staring at the place where it would appear. She would have only a second, as it slipped past, a second to merge memories with the present.
But the low-slung black vehicle purred halfway through the gates and came to a stop. Amy clutched the bike’s cold handlebars. She bled inside as if he had left only the day before, instead of almost five years ago. Sebastien opened the driver’s side—the side nearest to her—and climbed from the car.
He wore a long trench coat that billowed open as he stood up, revealing dark slacks and a light shirt, open at the collar. His charcoal-black hair was disheveled, his expression dark and angry. He was thinner, older, with a tension in his face that gave a cruel slant to his features. She recorded all that in the back of her mind while silently chanting his name.
He didn’t look her way, didn’t realize that she stood there, watching him. With forceful strides he crossed behind the car and went to the housekeeper, who smiled despite his imposing attitude. He nodded to her brusquely and took a handful of flowers from the basket.
Amy glanced toward the car. Through the open door she met the stern gaze of a woman dressed in a dark maternity blouse and skirt. His wife. A book lay open on the woman’s lap. A pillow cushioned the back of her neck, and her black hair draped over the white case in a smooth river. She was in the early stage of a pregnancy, judging by her barely evident stomach. Which child—their first? their third? They had been married almost three years.
Amy’s attention jerked back to Sebastien. He came to the driver’s door and, bending over, handed the flowers to his wife. He adjusted a side mirror, his hands moving with impatient force. For one heartbreaking moment he seemed about to turn toward Amy. She had no idea what she’d do if he looked at her. She was frozen in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions—sorrow, jealousy, a need to call his name, the horror that he would look at her and know who she was, the horror that he would drive away and never know.
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