The Last Birthday Party

by Gary Goldstein

  “But?” guessed Jeremy, hoping there was no but.

  Matty took a serious slug of his cocktail and fixed his gaze on Jeremy. “But how do you ever really know?”

  “Know what?”

  “If someone is really right for you—and you for them? I mean, you and Mom thought you belonged together. Turns out that had an expiration date.”

  Of course, thought Jeremy, why wouldn’t he and Cassie’s split make their son think twice about his own relationships? He told Matty what he told himself: “There’s no way to know anything. You just make the best decision you can at the time. Trust your gut and your history—and hope to succeed. It’s really all you can do.”

  Matty absorbed that as he scarfed up the last tortilla chip. “Do you think someone can be too good? Too perfect?”

  “Are we talking about Gabe?”

  “Well, we’re sure not talking about me,” said Matty with more self-awareness than he often let on. “It’s weird. He’s only a few years older than me but, I don’t know, he seems so much more … together. He’s really wise, y’know? It’s like there’s nothing he can’t do.”

  “A Renaissance man.”

  Matty considered that, then opened his menu. “Let’s order, okay? The margarita made me dizzy.”

  Join the club, thought Jeremy.

  Matty looked at the offerings a moment and then put the menu down. “It’s just that sometimes I feel like I have to work twice as hard to measure up. Like I don’t want to disappoint him.”

  “Of course you don’t. That’s what people do in a relationship. You try to be better for the other person—you want them to make you better. And, hopefully, vice versa.”

  “Sometimes it’s just hard to relax,” admitted Matty, eyes darting around the restaurant. “God, just working out together can turn into, like, this battle of the gladiators or something. It’s ridiculous.”

  “So don’t try so hard. Be yourself. I’ve seen Gabe around you and believe me, he likes what he sees.”

  Matty stayed quiet and glanced at his menu again.

  “And look, whether it’s Gabe or whomever, eventually you’ll settle down with someone. And that’ll mean enjoying their good qualities and learning to accept their less good qualities. And we all have them. Love is a package deal, kiddo.”

  Matty shut the menu and looked at his father. “Did you ever give Mom this pep talk?”

  That struck Jeremy. He relaxed. “I didn’t know I had to. Until it was too late.” He broke into a smile. “So consider yourself lucky.”

  CHAPTER

  30

  Jeremy stood with Annabelle in the exact spot of his cherished grapefruit tree, which existed now in just a few old photographs. He’d decided that if anyone was going to have the tree cut down, it would be him and not the new owners who would have no emotional connection to the once majestic canopy of citrus and shade. In the end, all that was left was a massive load of firewood, which they could bring in and burn that winter. Jeremy fleetingly considered taking the stack with him as a fitting remembrance but realized there was little chance a wood-burning fireplace would be in his future.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough on his plate, with his script rewrite mostly taking precedence over packing. Plus he hadn’t even started to seriously look for a new place to live; he might have to crash at Matty’s for a while after all.

  But the dying tree had been gnawing at Jeremy—a neighborhood gardener pronounced it a goner due to some bizarrely named citrus disease—and he wanted to give it a proper send-off. It took an entire Saturday morning, but the gardener and his tree-trimmer cousin dismantled the thing limb by limb. They promised Jeremy what was left of the stump would decompose over time; he knew he wouldn’t be there to see it.

  Jeremy told Annabelle about the tree’s place in Chez Lerner history: his and Cassie’s once-upon-a-time respites in the Adirondack chairs beneath its branches; how one spring the tree bore such a bumper crop that they passed out dozens of bags of fruit to the homeless; the many strange grapefruit-centric recipes Cassie tried until the novelty wore off, after which they just used the tart orbs for breakfast juice (and how more than half a glass, to this day, gave Jeremy heartburn). It was small stuff that you might have had to be there to appreciate but, for Jeremy, symbolized happier, more hopeful times in Laurel Canyon.

  “I didn’t peg you for the sentimental type,” Annabelle said later on as she helped Jeremy pack up a bunch of old clothes he planned to donate to Out of the Closet, a West Hollywood thrift store that benefited HIV/AIDS patients.

  “Y’mean about the grapefruit tree or these ancient clothes I can’t believe I ever wore?” Jeremy asked as he folded a pile of pleated pants and baggy button-up shirts that had 1990s written all over them.

  “Oh, definitely the tree,” she answered. “Your stories were really sweet.” She looked wistful. “Reminds me of how I feel when I look at every other thing around my house. Always that damn flood of memories. Make that a flood of memories that could use a dam!”

  Annabelle gave a rueful chuckle, though seemed contrite about bringing it up. The total honesty they swore in Cambria seemed less clear-cut now. She brightened again. “Look, honey lamb, however you slice it, it’s going to be a transition. But you’ll survive. I guarantee it.”

  He tied the drawstring on a bag of clothes. “Why, because I’m not the sentimental type?”

  What, was he just another typical, middle-aged straight guy who buried his feelings and tossed out emotional bones strictly as needed? He liked to think, if he didn’t exactly wear his heart on his sleeve, he was a pretty empathic, sensitive person. Right now, maybe too sensitive, which Annabelle, of course, picked up on.

  “I like that you’re not overly sentimental. You’re watchful, clear-eyed about things,” she said, packing a mound of loud, oversized sweaters into a carton.

  Why did that ring a bell? Oh, right, thought Jeremy, recalling his first date with Cassie. The one where she dubbed him “reserved, but not in a geeky way,” not “needy” or annoyingly transparent. Sure, it sounded good at the time—in a backhanded kind of way—but how did that ultimately work out for him? For them? Was he destined to repeat the same mistakes twice? Did he even fully know what they were?

  Forget watchful, clear-eyed, reserved, sentimental, or whatever the hell he was or wasn’t, a sudden tidal wave came over Jeremy and, without a safety net or an escape hatch, he blurted out, “Annabelle, what if we moved in together?”

  She looked up from the box she was sealing. Jeremy wasn’t sure he’d ever seen an expression on her face quite like the one she had that very second. It was a memorable crisscross of shock, wonder, and panic, as if she were being tested and didn’t know the right answer. For Jeremy’s part, his heart and head pounded out a neurotic duet; he wasn’t sure what he’d done, but there was no turning back. And right then, it didn’t seem like there was any going forward: Annabelle was speechless.

  “You don’t have to answer me now—or anytime soon, for that matter. Just putting it out there.”

  He disappeared back into his closet to bag up more old clothes, but they’d already packed them all. Now what? Jeremy pretended to be looking for something on an upper shelf; Annabelle’s silence was deafening. Then again, he’d surprised even himself with his impromptu invitation. The few seconds that his head was buried in the closet passed like hours.

  “Are you okay?” Jeremy had to ask.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, you just caught me a little off guard.” She sat on his bed and smoothed out her wrinkled shorts.

  “Anyway, as I said, it was just a thought. No worries,” Jeremy plowed ahead, sounding more like a stranger than a lover. He picked up one of the knotted bags. “Help me bring this stuff out to the car?”

  Annabelle grabbed the last carton she’d taped shut and followed him outside. As they loaded Jeremy’s Prius, sh
e broke the silence. “Were you talking about moving in with me?” she asked, as if searching for a missing puzzle piece.

  “Well, it’s a little late for you to move in here,” he said, indicating the Sold sign on Marjan’s realty placard.

  “Right,” Annabelle said pensively. She started back inside. “I’ll go get another carton.”

  “Annabelle, wait.”

  She stopped and Jeremy went to her.

  “What’s wrong? If you don’t want to live with me, it’s really okay. You wouldn’t be the first,” he said, hoping it would break the weirdness. It didn’t.

  “If I wanted you to move in, don’t you think I would have asked you already? Don’t you know me well enough by now? I mean, really, it’s not like it hasn’t been the elephant in the room lately.”

  It has? Sure, it had been on Jeremy’s mind a lot recently. Hadn’t he wondered if it was too soon to live with Annabelle, and if she’d even want to? And as much as he liked the idea of shared domesticity, wasn’t he conflicted about it himself? Still, it startled him to realize the topic had been looming over their relationship in such an elephantine way. Had he been so wrapped up in his own frantic life that he’d missed the boat by a mile yet again? Twice in a matter of minutes, he was struck by the parallels to his emotional failure with Cassie.

  “If I was a thoughtless idiot, I’m sorry,” Jeremy said, thinking about Joyce’s plea that he not hurt Annabelle. If he had, he certainly hadn’t meant to. Just the opposite.

  Annabelle walked back into the house. Jeremy trailed her. “Do you at least want to talk about this?” he asked as they entered the living room.

  She faced Jeremy, a slight trembling around her mouth, her dark eyes moist. “You’re not a thoughtless idiot. By a long shot.”

  “Then what is it?” He took Annabelle by her arms and tried to pull her into him, but she resisted. Jeremy let her go. She backed away and stood in front of a window as the late afternoon sun poured in, enveloping her in a light so bright she practically disappeared.

  “It’s not you, Jeremy, it’s me.” And just as quickly as that light had appeared it vanished, leaving a tearful Annabelle in its wake.

  Jeremy wanted to go to her, hold her, tell her everything would be okay, that they could go back to exactly how it had been between them. Nothing would have to change, and they could live happily ever after, just not under the same roof, if that’s what she wanted.

  But the earth had just shifted on its axis and, it seemed, Jeremy had given it a push.

  CHAPTER

  31

  During the weeks that Jeremy rewrote Offensive Measures—which, sigh, had already been retitled by Monolith’s crack marketing team as simply Offense (focus group testing revealed that the word “offense,” all by itself, felt more “dangerous” and “exciting”)—he received regular email missives of encouragement from Ian, such as “Hope you’re knocking it out of the park, dude!” There was also the sporadic “What if?” brainstorm from Laz, proposing new or tweaked set pieces, locations, visuals, reveals, and twists (“Only if it doesn’t fuck you up, mate.” Translated: “Do it.”).

  Jeremy took the added notes as they came, sometimes working them in, other times letting them go, because there was just so much you could cram into any script without sinking the ship. As for his main character’s gender switch, once Jeremy started to roll with the changes he found there weren’t as many radical shifts to make as he first expected. It turned out that he’d created a strong, sufficiently dimensional protagonist to withstand the required tinkering. Cal Garfield became Val Garfield, erectile dysfunction was replaced with a good old-fashioned case of depression, the lobbyist wife was now a husband (Jeremy considered keeping her a wife and making Garfield gay but it would have meant all new focus-group testing—seriously), Val still smoked a pipe (why not?) and, not for nothing, relied on a more tuned-in emotional core than Cal did to best her enemies and stay alive. That Jeremy endowed Val with some of Joyce, Cassie, and Annabelle’s best attributes was no accident.

  Speaking of Annabelle, she made herself scarce after the “let’s move in together” fiasco, telling him she needed some time alone to get her act together and reiterating that he’d done nothing wrong. Jeremy was hard-pressed to believe that. He’d opened a trapdoor into an unreconciled part of Annabelle’s psyche, the part where her late husband still lived and breathed and guided her from afar, let no man rend asunder—and it seemed Jeremy was that man. How could he have miscalculated so badly?

  “I’m not sure you heard what I told you that day on the lanai,” Joyce said when he called to tell her about Annabelle. He had woken her up from a midday nap, which was unusual for her; she rarely napped, said it screwed up her evening sleep.

  “I heard exactly what you told me, Ma: not to hurt her,” Jeremy answered defensively. “And that was my plan.”

  “You know what they say, darling: ‘People plan and God laughs.’”

  Jeremy wasn’t sure what “they” said but he knew what Joyce said; it was her favorite expression. “Anyway, Annabelle still hasn’t gotten past Gil’s death, and the thought of another man living with her in the house that she and her husband basically rebuilt together was just a bridge too far.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “No, but I pieced it together.” It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes. “Also that maybe Annabelle doesn’t want to sell her house and move into some all-new place with me. Not that I’d even offered that option.”

  “You may just be a victim of bad timing,” Joyce considered. “Had you met her a year from now it might’ve all been different. Mourning is like a cloud that one day just lifts.”

  “Yours didn’t. You said so yourself. What if five years from now, Annabelle’s still in the same place?” He didn’t mean to drag Joyce into the equation, but she obviously wanted to help—and it was a fair comparison. One that made him feel sad: for his mother, who chose to stay alone, and for Annabelle, who couldn’t control her fear and grief—nor could Jeremy control it for her (so, yeah, maybe he was feeling sad for himself as well).

  Joyce sighed through the phone. It wasn’t a sound Jeremy often associated with his can-do, cheerleading mom. “Honey, I wish I had a crystal ball but I don’t. All I know is if it’s truly bashert, it’ll work itself out. If not, well … just hang in there, okay, sweetie?”

  Joyce didn’t use a lot of Yiddish, just a few words left over from her parents’ daily chatter. But bashert, or “meant to be,” came up on special occasions for that extra dose of cosmic emphasis. Jeremy felt it best to leave it there.

  It wasn’t as if Jeremy hadn’t communicated at all with Annabelle since things went south, even if her few brief texts and emails were only in response to ones Jeremy had sent her. There apparently wasn’t a whole lot to say at the moment. She repeatedly assured Jeremy that this was on her, not him, and Jeremy repeatedly felt like a heel.

  Jeremy wanted to sit down and talk with her in person about it all, but she declined. Her bubbliness had burst. As much as he missed Annabelle and wanted them to figure out a plan B, he decided to back away until further notice—from her.

  On the plus side, if there was any, Jeremy had more time to finish his script rewrite and to clear more old shit out of the closets, cabinets, and corners of his house (had they ever thrown anything out?). It also left him extra time to hunt for a new place to live (he was still moving slug-slow on that front and had to step it up) and, oh, yes, deal with his divorce. He’d been in almost daily touch with his lawyer to untwist the snags that kept cropping up in the negotiations with Cassie and her attorney, a surprisingly young guy named Clarke Campbell who, at least according to the Google images Jeremy found of him, looked like a taller, slicker version of Eddie Munster.

  Most of the items, of course, involved money, the division of which wasn’t quite as clear-cut as it might have been before the Offensive Measures�
��er, Offense—sale. (Yes, Arvin Box had warned Jeremy about this but the devil was in the details.) And that temporary alimony thing Arvin first mentioned? Turned out to be a no-go for several reasons, not the least of which was that, unbeknownst to Jeremy, Cassie had just been laid off from the disability rights group where she had served as legal counsel the last seven years—the organization was having its own financial struggles—and was currently unemployed. (Jeremy was amazed Matty could keep that one a secret—unless he didn’t know either.)

  On top of it all, Jeremy’s supposedly healed shoulder was giving him trouble, probably because he never finished his physical therapy and had started lifting heavy things again way too soon. What was he supposed to do, move the boxes he was packing around with his feet? The result was a throbbing ache up and down his right arm that rivaled the pain he felt before, and in the weeks after, his surgery. Lorena in Dr. Hockstein’s office told Jeremy to take Advil or Aleve every day and lay off any serious lifting for two weeks. And that he was a bad boy.

  By the end of that very long week, Jeremy put the finishing touches on his rewrite of Offense. (Couldn’t they at least put a “The” in front of it? Jeremy wasn’t a big fan of one-word titles, not that anybody asked.) He ultimately executed about 80 percent of Ian and Laz’s notes, gaining more confidence as he hurtled forward.

  “Just have some good bullshit ready when they ask: ‘What happened to that hand-job-in-the-alley scene?’” Zoë advised him. Not that there was one but, you know, figuratively speaking.

  Meanwhile, Juliana, who Jeremy checked in with that Friday afternoon right before he emailed the revised script to Ian and Laz, praised him for his fast work but told him to take more time if needed. “You don’t get points for finishing early,” she said. “They’ll just think you rushed or forgot something.”

  It wasn’t early. There was no specified deadline. “Maybe they’ll just think I know what I’m doing,” Jeremy maintained from his perch on planet Logic.