The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  He speeded up. Floored it. Came roaring right at us with his brights on as we stood there in the middle of the street. And he wasn’t stopping. That wasn’t his plan at all. He was going to run us over. It was so sudden, so unexpected, that we barely had time to realize that we were dead. I froze. Marjorie screamed. Then I pushed her.

  Nine

  ALL WE HAD WAS a split second. No time to think. Only time to survive. Or to try. The way any living, breathing animal would instinctively try. I shoved Marjorie as hard as I could toward the curb. Then I dove the other way, into the middle of the street. He came barreling right between us like a big yellow four-door bowling ball, missing us both. He screeched to a halt, jammed it into reverse. He had me. I was a dead duck out there in the street, flat on my stomach. But we weren’t alone now. There were a couple of pedestrians on Madison. Cars had stopped at the signal. Witnesses, all of them. So he took off toward the park instead, burning rubber all the way. I managed to get his medallion number before he disappeared into the night. Then I struggled to my feet.

  Marjorie was sprawled in the gutter, smeared head to foot with some of New York City’s filthiest, blackest wetness. She was scraped up pretty badly, too. Her knees bled through her torn stockings.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  She nodded, her eyes wide with fright.

  I helped her to her feet. She trembled, leaning on me heavily. Me, I had no one to lean on.

  “D-Do you believe that asshole?” she gulped. “What was he trying to do?”

  “Kill us,” I replied simply. Or, more exactly, one of us—me. It hadn’t been my nerves. Someone had been measuring me when I was on Hudson Street earlier that evening. Waiting for the right time and place. He’d found it, too. Almost.

  She was staring at me. “Are you serious?”

  “I am.” I dusted off my knees. My trousers were torn. Morris Kanter, my tailor, would have a small fit. “You may find this difficult to believe, Marjorie, but not everyone likes me.”

  She let out a laugh. Relief, mostly. “You saved my life, Hoagy.”

  “I would have done it for anyone—except maybe Oliver Stone.” One of her shoes was out in the street, smashed flat. I went and got it for her. Staring at it in her hand, she began to tremble. I said, “C’mon, we’ll get you checked out over at Lenox Hill.”

  “No, no. I’m really fine.” She looked down at her besmirched and bloodied self. “All I want to do is get into the shower—and burn these clothes.”

  I hailed us another cab. This one overshot my outstretched arm by ten feet. But at least he didn’t try to flatten us.

  Marjorie headed straight for the bathroom when we got to her place. I headed straight for the liquor cabinet. It was in the cupboard over her refrigerator. One bottle of everything, most of them full, most of them good brands. It was as if she’d read a book on how to stock a bar. No problem finding the Courvoisier—the bottles were arranged alphabetically. So were the spices in her spice rack. Her kitchen was as bare and devoid of personality as the rest of her apartment. No snapshots of her college roommate’s new baby stuck to the refrigerator door. No wall calendar with engagements and family birthdays marked on it. No lists, no coupons, no gaily colored oven mitts, no nothing. I found two glasses and poured out two stiff brandies and drank them both. Then I refilled them and took them out to the living room. The phone was on the floor next to the sofa. I sat and phoned Very at home and woke him up.

  “Whoa, you’re getting close, dude,” he concluded, instantly alert. “Must be you struck a nerve.”

  “I sure wish I knew which nerve.”

  He took down the medallion number of the cab—5P77—and said he’d phone it in. He said that the letter, being high up in the alphabet, meant it had been a fleet cab, rather than an owner-operated one.

  “Driver must have been watching the Carlyle, waiting for you to come out,” he mused aloud. “You didn’t see who it was?”

  “He had his brights on.”

  “What makes you so sure it was a he?” he demanded.

  “Touché, Lieutenant. It could have been a woman.”

  “Was there anyone else in the cab? A fare?”

  “I don’t believe so. I think the driver was alone.”

  “And what about you, dude?”

  “What about me?”

  “Were you alone?”

  “I was not.”

  “Marjorie Daw, am I right? I am right.” He chuckled, immensely pleased with himself. “Way cool. At least we can cross her off our list of suspects now.”

  I glanced at the hallway. She was still in the shower. “Yes, I suppose we can.”

  “Where are you, dude?”

  “Her place.”

  “Want protection?”

  “No, I think I can handle her.”

  “Yo, I meant—”

  “I know what you meant, Lieutenant. And I’ll be okay.”

  “Cool. I’ll come by the studio in the morning. See if you can stay out of trouble until then.”

  “What’s your second choice?”

  He laughed. “Dude?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Enjoy.”

  I hung up and drained my brandy. She came out a moment later, scrubbed all clean and pink, her cropped blond hair slicked back, smelling of almond bath oil. She had on a sparkling white terry cloth robe. Her long, slender feet were bare. Her raw knees still oozed blood. She was clutching antibiotic ointment and bandages.

  She limped slightly as she made her way over to me. “I was just thinking …”

  “Always dangerous.”

  “How can you be sure it was you? What if it was me the cabbie was trying to run down?”

  “No one has any reason to kill you,” I replied, looking up at her. “Do they?”

  She looked away. “Why, no. I just … You’re right. Why would they?” She started to say something more, but changed her mind.

  I took the first-aid things from her. “Here, let me.”

  “I can do it,” she insisted.

  “Sit.” I pulled her down onto my lap. She was a feather compared to Merilee, even in her leanest of times. Feel free to tell Merilee I said so.

  I stretched her long, smooth legs out onto the sofa and smeared ointment on her wounded knees. She winced but didn’t cry one bit. Just sat there sipping her brandy and watching me warily. I could feel her green eyes on me, feel the tension in her slim body. I could feel something else, too. Our feverish hunger for each other was gone, the spell broken. It was lying somewhere out in the middle of Seventy-second Street with tire marks all over it. Her good sense had taken over. Or maybe mine had. I don’t know. I only know we were back where we’d started—strangers who hardly knew each other. And we both knew it.

  I bandaged her up, wondering why it was all of the women in my life were wearing gauze these days. “Look at it this way. At least you’re in the clear with Lieutenant Very now.”

  “You mean I wasn’t?” She seemed startled.

  “No one was. “And no one is—except for you.”

  She lingered there in my lap. Until I smiled at her. Hastily, she got up and sat as far away from me on the sofa as she could. Sat there in silence, inspecting her bandaged knees.

  “It’s not ever going to happen, is it?” she finally said, quietly.

  “What’s not?”

  “You’re never going to be over her.”

  “I’m never going to be over her.”

  She sighed and glanced up at the ceiling plaintively. “Oh, well. At least you’re honest.” She got up and came over to me and kissed me on the forehead. Then she padded down the hall and closed her bedroom door softly behind her. She didn’t bother to say good night.

  I sat there a moment, finishing her brandy. Then I rinsed out the glasses and turned out the lights. Then I went home. I don’t know if a big yellow cab followed me. I don’t know if anyone followed me. I didn’t care.

  I didn’t sleep very well.

 
In the morning God arrived from California.

  Ten

  WE SAT DOWN WITH him around the big table in the rehearsal room at nine o’clock sharp. God was big on punctuality. Lyle and Katrina were there, Katrina decked out in a sober leopard-pattern bustier and hot-pants ensemble. Marjorie, Leo, and The Boys were there. So was Jazzy Jeff Beckman, vice president of television production for Panorama Studios, who had flown in from L.A. with God. Fiona, Annabelle, and Bobby were not there. I was. There was coffee. There was pastry. There was a plainclothesman guarding the door. There was a great deal of tension, and no cheer. None. Zero.

  The morning papers had pounced on Chad’s death. “ZAPPED!” screamed the banner headline in the Daily News. “pissed!” cried the Post. Both were calling it murder, just as Very predicted they would. And both were right on top of the “mysterious food poisoning incident” as well, the News describing The Uncle Chubby Show as being “the victim of a crazed psycho-killer out for revenge or blood or both.” The Times didn’t bother with the story, since it happened locally. But the tabloids played it up big, so big it crowded the photos of Merilee and me standing together on Central Park West all the way back to the People pages, where the Post identified me as “former literary lion Shelby Haig.” Out in front of the studio, TV crews from Hard Copy, Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and Entertainment Tonight—the four horsemen of TV journalism’s apocalypse—were spilled out into the street with the Citizens for Moral Television, clamoring for more dirt. God had had to fight his way through the mob to get inside the building. As a consequence, he was in a bad mood. I didn’t know God well enough to know if he had a good one.

  Godfrey Daniels was a lanky, sandy-haired man in his early thirties with a chilly manner and a face like concrete. He said very little, and revealed even less about his true feelings or his intentions. Merely sat there, oozing self-importance. He wore thick, rimless glasses, and when listening to a pitch he propped them up just above his eyebrows, like a pair of welder’s goggles. When he spoke he affected a faint English accent, the result of a year of postgraduate studies at Oxford. Somehow, a myth had arisen that he’d been a Rhodes scholar-athlete, a myth he did nothing to deny. Actually, he had been one of the top amateur golfers in California when he was at Stanford. But it was television, not golf, that was in his blood. His father had been one of the producers of Gomer Pyle. And a close friend of Grant Tinker, who gave Godfrey his first job. Godfrey dressed casually but expensively in a Charvet striped broadcloth shirt open at the neck, glen plaid linen slacks, and tasseled Ferragamo loafers. A pale yellow Sea Island cotton cardigan was thrown over his shoulders. Sweaters were his trademark. He always wore one, never a jacket. His detractors, and they were many, called him The Empty Sweater. When they weren’t calling him God.

  Jazzy Jeff Beckman, Lyle’s financial partner, was an edgy, pimply little ferret in his late twenties with a flattop crew cut and the softest, pinkest hands I’d ever seen on a man. Jazzy Jeff wore a denim shirt and flowered silk tie and khakis, as well as the lingering symptoms of Bell’s palsy, a stress-related disorder where the nerves on one side of the face go numb, causing it to sag—somewhat like a Dick Tracy character. And causing him to dribble saliva out of that side of his mouth. He had to keep dabbing at it with a napkin, and had trouble speaking. Which was no problem. Like God, he was there to listen.

  And Lyle was there to pitch. And pitch he did. He went high and hard with the same patched-together retread of his that he’d shpritzed the day before, the one where Chubby takes Deirdre to the pool hall himself. Heavy on the brother-sister bonding. Heavy on the meaning of family. Heavy on the social relevance thing, too. Up came those six million hungry kids again, and the sixteen million without health coverage, Lyle wielding the statistics like a club, daring God to turn his back on those poor, sick, hungry kids, his kids. Lyle pitched sans mask and gloves, and he was surprisingly nervous. Kept talking faster and faster, like a salesman who is about to have the door slammed in his face. Still, it was a good pitch. Lots of enthusiasm. Lots of laughs.

  Not that God ever laughed. Not once. The programming wizard merely sat there slumped in his chair, glasses up on his forehead, listening. Never once did his facial expression change. Jazzy Jeff laughed once or twice, politely, but mostly sat there wiping his drool and watching God for a sign. Marjorie Daw kept watching God, too. She was extremely deferential around him. Did not speak unless spoken to. She wore a navy blazer and white gabardine slacks over her bandaged knees, and seemed even more poised and alert than usual. Me she wouldn’t look at.

  God didn’t react at all when Lyle was done. Just continued to sit there, blank-faced, all eyes in the room upon him. Until, abruptly, he flipped his glasses down onto his nose and turned to Jazzy Jeff. “How do you like it?” he asked the little studio veep.

  “Cute,” Jazzy Jeff hedged, dabbing at his mouth. Actually, what he said was “Oot-groot,” but I’d never stoop so low as to make fun of someone with a speech impairment, even a short television executive. I’m just trying to give you a feel for the room. Part of my job.

  “It’s marvelously cute,” God agreed, his voice genteelly clipped. “It’s about heart. It’s about warmth, family values—everything we’re looking for at eight o’clock.”

  “I knew you’d like it, pal.” Lyle was beaming. “Because it’s about who we are. And wait’ll I tell ya what happens in the second show—”

  “But we’re mothballing you until we can recast Rob,” God broke in brusquely. “We’ll hold your slot for you until then. I’m here to give you my word on that, Lyle. We’re good for at least three weeks—we’ve got the Mac Culkin back-to-school special, the American League Championship Series … Worst-case scenario, we can even slide in a couple of your slam-dunk shows from first season to get your viewers wet for you. Right?”

  Lyle gaped at him in stunned disbelief. It was obvious that God had already made up his mind before he left L.A. He’d simply listened to Lyle’s pitch as a courtesy. He had no intention of going ahead without a new Rob Roy Fruitwell. None. Zero.

  “Major bonus for your writing staff, as well,” God continued. “Gives you time to get your first six-pack in Emmy shape. Meanwhile, we look for Rob. It won’t be easy. Chad was such a perfect fit. But we’ll find our man. Maybe someone will shake out after the first-wave cancellations. If not, we can always—”

  “Time out here!” Lyle blustered, his anger mounting. “This is the show I wanna do, Godfrey. I’m taping this show this week. And I feel very strongly about it.”

  God said nothing. He had already spoken. He would not get down in the trenches with Lyle. Instead, he shot a look at Jazzy Jeff.

  Jazzy Jeff wiped his mouth. “How do you feel about Tony Curtis, Lyle?”

  The Boys froze. I think Tommy Meyer even stopped breathing.

  “What’s Tony fucking Curtis got to do with anything?” Lyle demanded, glowering at him.

  “Man’s looking for a series,” Jazzy Jeff replied. “Looks great, feels great. Any reason Rob couldn’t be a tiny bit older?”

  “He’s seventy years old!” Lyle roared, his face turning red.

  “Sixty-nine,” Jazzy Jeff countered. “And it’s not as if Fiona’s twenty-something.”

  “Tony would perk up our older demographics immensely, Lyle,” added God. “Let’s face it—it’s the seniors who are sitting home at night watching us. And older women, they remember Tony when he was a real matinee idol.”

  “Mr. Tight Pants,” agreed Jazzy Jeff, nodding.

  “He’s seventy!” bellowed Lyle. He was sweating and shaking now.

  “Sixty-nine,” said God.

  “And can he play comedy,” Jazzy Jeff enthused, drooling. “I saw him on cable just the other night in Some Like It Hot with Marilyn Monroe. Drop-dead funny. And Tony was hysterical in it.”

  “That was thirty-five years ago!” Lyle shouted.

  “People loved him in that bloopers special he did for us just last season,” God countered.
/>   “He tested so well we signed him to an overall deal,” added Jazzy Jeff.

  “Which you’re looking to burn off by dumping him in my show!” hollered Lyle, enraged. Katrina patted his arm, trying to calm him. He slapped it away. “Absolutely not, Godfrey! No way! No, no, no! I refuse. You guys are outta your fucking minds. Tony Curtis?! Un-fucking-believable! I mean, shit, why don’t we just go all out and hire Elvis, huh?! She can fuck his ghost!”

  God stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I love that. That’s a slam-dunk eight-o’clock show. It’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, only hipper.”

  “Slam dunk,” agreed Jeff. “If only we could find the Hope Lange of the nineties.”

  “Farrah,” said God with cool certainty. “It’s perfect for her.”

  “And Ryan can play Elvis,” Jazzy Jeff burbled excitedly. “Real-life husband and wife—what could be more perfect? What resonance! What doability!”

  “And Ryan won’t even have to lose any weight,” cracked Marty.

  “Just remember to name her character Diana,” Tommy advised drily. “So you can call it The King and Di.”

  God stared at him. “I love that.”

  “Slam dunk!” cried Jazzy Jeff. “And I’ve got the perfect husband-wife writing team on the lot. She’s even from Tupelo.”

  God pointed a finger at Jazzy Jeff. “We have to talk about this on the plane home.”

  “Definitely,” agreed Jazzy Jeff.

  Lyle just sat there in pained, miserable silence. They were so caught up in their idea they’d forgotten all about him.

  Me, I just felt fortunate to be there. I was actually seeing the creative process happen—the birthing of a prime-time hit. I felt lucky. Ill, but lucky.

  Lyle seized back the floor. “I won’t do my show with Tony Curtis!” he screamed, pounding the table like a huge, unruly, child. “I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

  “Okay, then how about Richard Lewis?” offered Jazzy Jeff, effortlessly changing direction.

  “The comic?” Lyle seemed thrown by this one. His fat lower lip started to quiver with agitation.