“Is, uh, everything good with you?” he asked.
Jeremy rose, hyper-aware of his bed-headed, barefoot self. “Yeah, just got a late start on the day.” It hit Jeremy again: the review. Fuck. “In fact, I’ve gotta get back inside. Deadline debacle.” Lola squatted and peed on a patch of weeds.
“Sure, sorry, go,” said Crash. “Oh, and hey, we meant to stop by yesterday and tell you and Cassie what a great party that was. So much fun. Did you have fun?”
Jeremy stared at the kindly Crash as if to say, Do I look like someone who’s had any fun in the last forty-eight hours?
“It would have been more fun if I were turning thirty,” Jeremy joked. Crash gave a respectful nod to his elder, the kind that read: best not get into any age discussions considering I’m thirty-two. Jeremy relented for the sake of getting back inside: “It was a really good time. Glad you and Katie could make it. Hey, enjoy your walk, okay?”
Jeremy dashed back into the house, raced to his desk, and checked his email. The last four messages to arrive were from Lucien, each in increasing levels of urgency culminating in the final note’s subject line: “Are you dead?” As Jeremy contemplated how to answer and what exactly he could do to rectify this one-off truancy—and let’s be real, it’s not like Jeremy was a surgeon who had blown off a lung transplant—his phone rang. The screen read: “Lucien.”
Jeremy considered not answering but knew that was not an option. Just man up and tell the truth. Well, maybe not the whole truth. What even was the whole truth? Anyway, Lucien was his friend, not his enemy. He’d understand and probably even have a quick solution; editors were nothing if not resourceful. Without, as they say, further ado, Jeremy took the call.
“Hello?”
“What the fuck happened, man? Where is it?”
Okay, sounding more enemy than friend, and not particularly resourceful.
Jeremy steeled himself and blurted out, “Cassie left me.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Yeah, apparently it’s official.” Jeremy switched to a document screen, gazed at the blank page of his would-be review.
“Oh, my God, dude, I’m so sorry. I mean, she just threw you that rockin’ party and then, what, dumped your ass?” Jeremy’s normally erudite editor suddenly sounded like Matty.
“Yeah, I’m pretty wrecked,” Jeremy admitted.
“Shit. Okay, look, I want to hear more about this, I do, but first—where’s the review? Please tell me you already sent it and that it just did one of those email disappearing acts?” Lucien sounded a bit hyper-desperate; Jeremy’s empty stomach churned.
“I’m really sorry, Lucien, I watched the film last night and was going to stay up and write, but it was late and I guess I fell asleep and I didn’t wake up till—”
“So you never sent it?” Lucien interrupted.
“No, but if I start now, you can have it in an hour, tops.” Jeremy spoke completely out of his ass. “I mean, it’s just a capsule.”
“No, it’s not—it’s full length!”
Okay, that surprised Jeremy. Before he could check last week’s email assigning him the review, Lucien continued, his voice escalating: “Besides, you know noon is my drop-dead to get copy to the desk for next day’s section. Which is why I need my reviewers to file no later than 10 a.m. How many years have you been doing this?”
“Twelve, give or take,” said Jeremy, the pain starting up in his shoulder and arm. He was greeted by a loaded silence. “Look, Lucien, I fucked up, I know. I’m really sorry but, truly, give me a couple of hours, and I’ll get you something you can at least post online today, maybe get it into print Wednesday?” But even as Jeremy was tossing this Hail Mary pass he knew better, knew this was not how things worked.
“We planned a big opening day spread for the movie—your review, interview with the filmmaker, the works. You know why?”
Jeremy had no idea. To him, it was just another obscure, if meaningful documentary that too few people would see.
“I’ll tell you why: the producer is Geneva’s cousin and she promised him great opening day coverage in print, which, as I think you know, is where most of the audience for a movie like this still gets their information.” Geneva Harcourt was Lucien’s erratic boss.
Oh, shit on toast. Why didn’t Lucien tell him this sooner? Would it have mattered?
“Well, Geneva runs the whole section, right? Can’t she push the schedule? Pull some ‘stop the presses’ move?” What was it, the 1940s? If Jeremy were a car he’d have been running on fumes.
“You’re joking, right? She’s an editor, Jeremy, not fucking Moses!”
“I know, Lucien, I’m just grasping here. I feel awful. Is there anything I can do?”
“Yeah, you can let me off the phone so I can give Geneva the good news.”
“Okay, this might be a stupid question,” said Jeremy, “but should I still write the review?” It took Jeremy a few seconds to realize Lucien had already hung up. Might be a stupid question?
Jeremy stared at his unwritten review page, blinking cursor taunting him. Damn, he was starving. The review, if he even had to write it at this point, could wait a few minutes, certainly until he heard back from Lucien with the verdict from above. Besides, he’d really need to zip through the documentary again, try to recall more of the key moments than he could right now, before digging into his critique. Christ, 750 words on this thing! Capsule length he might have been able to power through, but a longer piece he couldn’t fudge.
It was all so unlike Jeremy. He approached every review he wrote, not to mention the various entertainment features and interviews he was often assigned, with the utmost care. He took his work, his responsibility—to the reader, to the artist, to Lucien, to himself—super seriously. Jeremy took most things super seriously. Too seriously sometimes, at least so said Cassie, who, for so much of their life together, brought a welcome lightness—a kind of enviable blitheness—to Jeremy’s and, later, Matty’s world. She didn’t think ten steps ahead the way Jeremy did. “If it sucks, you can stop, or you can start over, babe,” Cassie would say. “But not trying is unacceptable.”
Had she just taken her own advice? She thought their marriage sucked, so she stopped, wanted to start over (without him, apparently), had to at least try to make a change? How could the words that had so often been his engine, the proverbial wind beneath his wings, turn around to bite him in the ass with such unexpected force and irony?
And, really, what test did he fail?
Jeremy returned to the kitchen and checked the fridge for lunch potential. He decided to throw out the remains of the party leftovers. Just seeing them made him angry and sad—even if he was able to stomach some yesterday. Another day, another mindset. When they were safely stashed in the garbage bin, Jeremy peered back into the fridge, spotted an egg carton and decided an omelet was in order. He took out three eggs, milk, a bag of grated cheddar, placed it all on the counter, then hunted around for a tall mixing bowl to whisk it all up in.
There it was, in the same cabinet as the scotch bottle that had wreaked so much havoc the day before, perched just one shelf below. It was a bit high, but no way was he getting out that wicked stepladder again. Without thinking (something Jeremy had gotten ridiculously good at lately), he stood on his toes, shot his right arm up toward the mixing bowl, and let out an anguished scream. Everything went black.
CHAPTER
6
The next thing Jeremy knew he was lying on a stretcher in the back of a lurching ambulance as a burly, bearded EMT worked a blood pressure machine at his side.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Lerner, you’re going to be okay,” said EMT guy as he read the blood pressure gauge.
“What happened?” asked “Mr. Lerner.” He eyeballed his stalwart attendant (“Kyle” was stitched on his steel gray polo shirt), then scanned the oxygen tanks and monitors and straps and
hooks and piles of bandages and medical whatnot that lined the cramped van’s walls. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything since … I think I was in my kitchen and I—”
“Thank God I found you, is all I can say!” chirped a familiar voice from the front of the van. It couldn’t be …
“Wait—Mom?” He’d never been so confused in his life.
“Honey, I’ll tell you all about it later, okay?” said Joyce, whose melodious voice could make even the worst news sound less dire.
Jeremy turned to Kyle. “Why is my mother here?”
The long and the short of it, as Kyle and Joyce eventually explained, was that Jeremy had blacked out a few hours ago reaching for that mixing bowl, maybe from the piercing pain in his shoulder, or maybe because he hadn’t eaten in nearly a day. Then again, Kyle speculated, it may have been from a severe form of stress. No one had mentioned a brain tumor, so Jeremy certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.
“Have you been under unusual stress?” the EMT asked.
“His wife just left him, so the answer would be yes,” Joyce called from the front seat, with a bit less lilt than usual. His mom had clearly taken sides in the short time she’d been aware of Cassie’s departure.
It turned out that when Jeremy hadn’t returned Joyce’s many calls since the party—though he wanted to answer, he’d let her messages go to voicemail, still not wanting to enmesh her in the mess of it all until he had a better handle on things—she got hold of her grandson who broke the news about the split in, no doubt, a rather burning and dramatic fashion.
Joyce then hopped in her ancient BMW (it was his dad’s car, she wouldn’t give it up), tore away from her Encino condo and hightailed it down Ventura Boulevard and up into Laurel Canyon. Without knocking or ringing his bell—a mother knows when there’s a crisis unfolding—Joyce entered Jeremy’s house with the key he’d given her years ago just in case (of what, he didn’t know back then, but it sure wasn’t this) and found her son conked out on the kitchen floor. An egg had rolled off the counter and lay splattered at his side. Without skipping a beat, or even trying to wake him, she called 911.
Matty met Jeremy and Joyce—and yes, Kyle, who by then had been convinced by Joyce to learn to play canasta, don’t ask how or why—at the Cedars-Sinai emergency room. The place was packed to the gills, and all Jeremy wanted was to get out of the ER bed and back into his own. His wishes were nobody’s command.
“Dad, you’re a mess. You’re not going anywhere except for an X-ray. And maybe a shower,” ordered Matty, who, as usual, called it as he saw it—or in this case, smelled it.
“Sweetie, you don’t want to end up passed out on your kitchen floor again, do you?” asked his mother. “I may not be there to rescue you again.”
“Thanks, Ma, but I don’t need rescuing. It was a little accident, I’m fine,” said Jeremy.
“I’ve known you for fifty years and two days, baby doll, and this ain’t fine,” Joyce said, sounding like a Prohibition-era song lyric as she wiggled her index finger at her son.
Matty checked his phone, tapped a few keys. He started out. “Be right back, got a work thing.” He’d started working recently for an event-planning company as an assistant. (“I’m really a ‘coordinator,’ but they cheaped out on the title,” Matty had grumbled when he was hired, one foot already out the door.) Jeremy was sorry he’d screwed up his kid’s workday but was secretly happy he’d shown up.
“Shouldn’t Cassie know you’re in the hospital, dear?” asked Joyce as soon as Matty had left the emergency room.
“I’m not really ‘in’ the hospital and no, she doesn’t need to know. Right now, she doesn’t need to know anything. Or, trust me, even wants to.” Jeremy was suddenly parched. “Think I could get some water?”
Joyce, prepared as ever, pulled a bottle of Fiji from her oversized purse. “Honey, what in the world happened with you and Cassie? And, by the way, I wish I’d heard about it from you and not my grandson.”
Jeremy scanned the emergency room for whatever doctor might be headed his way. God, his shoulder hurt. “I don’t know, Ma, apparently I failed some test.”
“What kind of test?” She leaned in, swept Jeremy’s lank hair off his forehead, and eyed him with deep concern.
“I have no idea, but whatever it was, it’s the biggest test I’ve ever failed in my life.” He gulped some Fiji and felt the electrolytes seep into his brain. He met Joyce’s questioning gaze and could tell she was formulating her words to be as gentle and direct as possible. It was one of her specialties.
“Honey, I was married to your father for a long time. It wasn’t all a bed of roses, as you are well aware. But I always knew one thing—if I wanted to know what was causing a rough patch I just had to look in the mirror.”
“He was the one who should’ve been looking in a mirror,” Jeremy said. Joyce looked wistful. “I mean, you know how he could be,” he added apologetically. He should have known better than to dump on Saint Larry.
“All I’m saying, sweetheart, is that it takes two to foxtrot.” She brought the thin blanket up over Jeremy’s shoulders. They kept the place like a meat locker.
“I believe it’s tango.”
“Any dance will do,” Joyce said with a knowing smile.
“Except maybe the conga,” he managed to joke. Jeremy realized he’d misread his mother’s earlier disdain for Cassie. Or maybe she’d just had some time to think it through. Either way, Jeremy knew that whatever sent his wife packing was as much his doing as hers. He just wasn’t ready to dissect it yet. Some critic he was.
Speaking of critics: “Oh, fuck, I completely forgot!” A few people glanced over at Jeremy, then returned to their own troubles. “Where’s my phone?” he asked, eyes darting.
“I’ve got it, honey. What’s wrong?” she asked, fishing it out of her bottomless purse.
“I’ll tell you in a second.” Jeremy took his cell from Joyce and steeled himself as he found a text Lucien had sent a few hours earlier. His face fell as he read: “Geneva livid. Tried to convince her not to fire you, but failed. Sorry, J. Call me.” He looked up at his mother, sighed.
“Is it from Cassie?” Joyce asked. Jeremy shook his head in defeat and showed her the phone. She read the text, confused. “Who’s Geneva?”
“She runs the Calendar section,” Jeremy answered, flashing back over twelve years and some 2000 reviews he’d written. “I blew a deadline,” he explained. It felt as much like a death as Cassie’s exit, but one that, perhaps unlike what went down with his wife, had been completely avoidable. The connection between the two events was hardly lost on Jeremy and, from the look on her face, Joyce as well. He felt angry and miserable and, most of all, ashamed.
“Oh, Jeremy,” his mom said. She thought for a second. “But can they really ‘fire’ you? You’re not officially an employee, right?”
“They can just not hire me, how’s that?”
There was a commotion somewhere in the vast waiting area. Jeremy couldn’t tell what was going on but the gruesome sounds made his shoulder pain seem minor.
“But you’re the best reviewer they have!” Joyce said, staying adorably on message despite the outer fracas.
“Spoken like a true mother,” Jeremy responded with a sideways grin.
“Not just me, all my friends think so,” she said as if she and her circle of eighty-year-old Valley gals ran the joint. Jeremy wanted to get up from the wheeled bed and hug Joyce for her unwavering cheerleading skill but plopped his head back on the squishy pillow instead.
They were silent for a moment. The tumult had died down. Someone, maybe someone else’s devoted mother, quietly wept from afar.
“Well,” reasoned Joyce, adjusting herself in the plastic chair, “maybe now you’ll have the time to work on your new screenplay.”
Jeremy had been working on his “new” screenplay for six years, almo
st finishing it several times, then starting all over again. He was never quite happy enough with what he’d created, much less why he created it—guilt over his aborted screenwriting career more than any great desire to write a new script. Whenever Jeremy returned to the pages of that convoluted political thriller, it felt as if he were merely catching up instead of progressing.
Before starting that script, it’d been years—thirteen to be exact—since Jeremy had written his last screenplay, discouraged by selling a grand total of zero scripts after Parting Gifts, the romantic comedy he’d managed to set up at Universal for a shockingly tidy sum when he was a wee twenty-seven, in what now seemed like the fluke of all flukes. (After about four years in development hell, people stopped asking Jeremy when “his movie” was going to get made. It wasn’t.) The script doctoring gigs open to Jeremy in the wake of his Parting Gifts success were also short-lived.
Needing to make some kind of steady living again, he’d applied for the film reviewer position at the Times that he’d heard about from a publicist friend. And, though it turned out to only be freelance, he grabbed it, eventually parlaying the gig into all kinds of other print and internet writing assignments, and cobbling together a new career.
“Good idea, Ma, maybe I will get back into it,” Jeremy finally said, with no intention of diving into that script again.
“You know what they say, honey, one door closes and another one opens,” Joyce reminded Jeremy, as if that said it all about his situation.
Who knows, he thought, maybe it kind of did.
Matty, a Coke Zero in hand, reappeared with a doctor in tow, a thirtyish fellow with a metal clipboard, oversized white coat and a genial smile. “Dad, this is Dr. Bhattasali. We met in the hall. He’s going to take care of you.”
The Last Birthday Party Page 4