Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  Perry could see the two of them in his mind, like actors on a stage. It reminded him of one of those improvisational theater evenings, where the drama could move to all kinds of different endings, depending on the next gesture or the next line.

  “As soon as Jane gets back, we’ll get together,” Perry said.

  “I can’t wait to meet her,” Liz said. “And when Jeffrey comes out, we’ll all do the town.”

  Liz walked him to the door and opened it, the musky scent of her perfume mixing with the other aromas of the night. Perry turned and hurried out, like a man fleeing a burning building. He sped home, careening around corners, wanting to call Jane, hear her voice, assure himself everything was the same between them, that she hadn’t intuitively picked up any small “blip” of his momentary temptation on the screen of her own radar.

  It was not quite one o’clock when he got in, which was still not terribly late. He picked up the phone and then put it back down, realizing it was almost four in the morning in Vermont. Damn. If he called her now, it would frighten her. It would seem like an emergency. He felt in fact like there almost had been one, but he didn’t want her to know that. He got into his bathrobe, poured himself the cognac he was glad he hadn’t had with Liz Caddigan, and sat on the bed, clutching the glass with both hands.

  Perry went to meet Jane at the airport with flowers. He felt light, buoyant, as if he were walking around about five or six inches off the ground, just naturally, without any effort. He got up early and knocked out a couple of crucial scenes, and he was not only feeling good about himself as a writer but as a man, a person.

  Instead of feeling guilty about the drink with Liz at her apartment, he had awakened feeling relief as he realized he had met and overcome the great cliche, Hollywood temptation. He had passed up the chance to go to bed with a real-live, attractive actress in the tan, taut, living flesh. He had remained true to his wife, to his marriage, to his old-fashioned concept of fidelity—despite distance of miles or life-style—and so had remained true to himself. The whole experience made him feel less panicky about facing other temptations and tests of this place, for he had already passed one of the basic ones, the kind that changed people, changed the way they lived and looked at life.

  He couldn’t wait to get his arms around his wonderful, loving wife.

  She was one of the last passengers off the plane, dragging her winter coat behind her, looking pale and disoriented, like some kind of refugee. When she saw Perry she lurched toward him and he caught her as she threw her arms around him and kissed him sloppily, her mouth like a cask of stale brandy.

  “For God sake,” he said, pulling away.

  “Love me, love me not?” she asked, blinking, trying to focus.

  He took her arm and turned her, hoping to steady her as they went to the luggage.

  “You smell like a Saint Bernard,” he said.

  She wrenched her arm away from his grip.

  “Oh, phoo. Phoo you.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him and stumbled, and he grabbed her again, guiding, gritting his teeth.

  He had never seen her drunk, or rather, the few times she’d been drunk, he’d been in the same state, and so hadn’t minded. This was different. This was disgusting. She was drunk and he was not. He tried to concentrate just on getting her home.

  Driving back she rolled down the window and Perry was on the alert to pull over if she started getting sick. The fresh air seemed to revive her, though, as she stuck her head out the window, singing off key as she slurred her improvised words.

  “Cal-a-forn-ya here I am,

  like a great big candied yam …”

  He blamed it on first class. They didn’t stop pouring the booze for you. That, and after all, she had had to do all the dirty work of making the big switch, packing up, saying good-byes. He wasn’t going to make a big issue of this, just get her to bed and start fresh the next day.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said. “It finally got to me.”

  She slept it off the next morning, spent the day unpacking and soaking herself in a warm bath, and greeted Perry that night when he came home from the studio with crackers and brie, a Bloody Mary for him, and a Virgin Mary for herself.

  “Hey, it’s no wonder,” he said. “You must have worked your tail off getting everything wrapped up out there.”

  He had put an arm around her but now she moved away, walking slowly toward the window, so her back was toward him.

  “It wasn’t the work,” she said.

  “What, then?”

  “The whole thing. What we’re doing—the move. I realized how big it is. The change.”

  “Lovey, it’s only temporary.”

  “It’s also enormous.”

  She turned and looked at him. There was a faint trace of red on her upper lip from the drink, and it accentuated the paleness of her face.

  “Being back there,” she said, “trying to explain to people what we’re doing, what it’s like out here, I felt sort of crazy. There were moments I wondered if maybe I’d dreamed it.”

  She lifted her arm, indicating the room, the window behind her, the bright lemon light falling in.

  “All this,” she said. “California.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He knew just what she meant, for now, trying to conjure up his life in Vermont, the one that was real to him only a little more than a month ago, all that seemed like a dream.

  Jane had just moved back and forth between dreams, and it must have been frightening as well as exhausting. Perry was struck by the scary notion that one of the two of them might get caught up in the opposite dream, and that it might really separate them, take them away from each other. That was something he had never before thought possible, under any circumstance. He got up and went to her and put his arms around her and she grabbed him, digging her fingers into his back as they swayed back and forth, together, tightly, holding each other in the same dream.

  V

  You had to hold on.

  You not only had to hold on to each other, you had to hold on to yourself, to your own perspective.

  You had to hold on because everything started going so fast.

  You had to hold on or you might fall off.

  “We’re flying,” Archer Mellis said.

  The project was really off the ground now that Perry had finished writing the second hour. The network loved it so much they were willing to spring for the extra expense of shooting exteriors on location instead of just on the lot and around L.A., in an effort to preserve the original New England ambience of the story. Of course they couldn’t afford to go all the way to Vermont, as Archer had originally assured Perry was the only way to do the piece properly, but the ingenious young executive had discovered a campus in a small town outside San Jose that miraculously conveyed what Archer assured everyone was “a heavy New England flavor.” He was taking up some of the “First Year” staff that day to scout it out.

  “Do all of us get to go?” Perry asked eagerly.

  “I can only take one,” said Archer.

  Ned jumped up and started pacing, the vein in his temple turning red as it began to throb.

  “Surely we can dig up a few more plane tickets out of the budget,” he said. “Is that the problem?”

  Archer, who was pacing in a different direction, wheeled and fixed Ned with narrowed eyes, as if he had him in the cross hairs of his rifle site.

  “I don’t pinch pennies, amigo,” he said icily. “The problem is I only have room in my plane for one passenger.”

  Archer had a pair of goggles cocked up on his forehead and a silk ascot tucked into his tunic. Though he bore a striking resemblance to the young Errol Flynn as the flying ace of The Dawn Patrol, Perry had simply assumed this was another of his dashing costumes, rather than real aviation apparel. Come to think of it, though, he knew that flying a plane was one of Archer’s many daring avocations, along with skydiving, scuba diving, steer wrestling, and white-water kayak racing.
/>   “Forgive me, Archer!” Ned exclaimed. “I simply assumed we’d be flying up on PSA.”

  “We’d have to go to San Jose on commercial flights,” Archer explained, “but I can take us right into Saratoga, where the college is. There’s a small airfield at the edge of town. Saves lots of time.”

  “What a guy!” Ned said, throwing up his hands in tribute.

  Kenton shifted his great bulk uneasily in his chair.

  “Somebody better stay here and mind the store,” he said. “I’d like to keep an eye on that set they’re building for Jack and Laurie’s living room.”

  Archer nodded.

  “Perry, you get to work on those last notes from the network,” he said. “See if you can wrap up revisions by tomorrow.”

  Archer pulled a couple of automatic cameras out of a drawer and tossed one to Ned as he flung the other around his neck.

  “We’ll take plenty of shots for you people,” he assured Kenton and Perry with a brisk nod. “Come on, Ned—my Cessna’s at Santa Monica.”

  Perry jumped up to get to his own task, exhilarated. It was like being in on a great military campaign, with excitement mounting as the shooting drew near.

  “Great news!” Perry called out to Jane when he burst in the door that night. “We get to shoot on location!”

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  She looked stricken.

  “What the hell’s the matter?” Perry demanded.

  Jane sat down on the couch, holding her arms over her stomach as if she were fighting the onset of appendicitis.

  “I thought that was all off,” she said.

  “The network loved the script so much they’re willing to pay for it! You ought to be thrilled—this is a triumph!”

  “Darling, I’m happy for you. But I just can’t turn around and go back to Vermont, especially after this last trip, after all the explanations, all the good-byes. I’m not a human Ping-Pong ball.”

  Perry smiled and sighed.

  “Lovey,” he said, sitting down and putting an arm around her, “this has nothing to do with Vermont. The cost of that would be prohibitive—I thought you understood that.”

  “But you just said they like it so much they’re willing to pay to go on location.”

  “Not in Vermont. That’s out of the question. Archer found a place up north that he said has real New England ambience. He and Ned flew there today to scout locations.”

  “Up north?” she asked. “You mean Canada? I guess that would have a similar look.”

  “Not Canada, lovey. It’s a college in a little town called Saratoga, near San Jose. California.”

  “San Jose! What in the name of heaven is New Englandy about San Jose? It’s not even as far north as San Francisco!”

  “How do you know? You haven’t even been there.”

  Jane shook her head, smiling ruefully.

  “Remember when you told Archer it had to be filmed in Vermont or the story wouldn’t make sense?”

  “That was ages ago, before I understood the realities.”

  Jane started giggling.

  “What the hell’s so funny?”

  “Maybe no one will notice the redwoods,” she said. “Maybe they can be disguised as giant pine trees.”

  “You really are hilarious,” Perry said.

  It was like standing in the middle of a dream.

  His own dream.

  This was the living room of Jack and Laurie’s apartment, just as he’d conceived it—a combination of Salvation Army funk and academic chic. There was a swayback couch strewn with bright-colored corduroy pillows, blond Scandinavian-design chairs around a matching breakfast table, brick-and-board bookcases that held not only well-worn volumes but also gleaming chrome stereo components. There was the dark-shellacked door resting on sawhorses that held Jack’s old Smith Corona as well as a mess of his books and papers. There was even Laurie’s cello propped in a corner of the room next to an ironing board. There were framed posters of colored photographs on the wall: the tall wineglass filled with big, ripe strawberries that represented to them the abundance of life, and the canoe, empty except for the paddles pointing out to sea, that they knew meant the wonderful “mystery” of life, that high afternoon they bought the posters.

  It was eerie, standing and walking around in that imagined room that now was real.

  Or was it?

  Perry suddenly plopped down into a chair to make sure it was solid, and not the stuff of dreams, or the illusion of madness.

  The chair held him. Relieved, he stood up, walked to the bookshelves and pulled out a book, at random.

  He looked at it and frowned.

  It was one of those old one-volume Reader’s Digest condensations.

  “What’s the matter?” Ned Gurney asked.

  Perry looked up and saw that the two men standing with Ned were leaning forward, hanging on every word, looking as anxious as if they were about to hear a guilty verdict that would send them both to death row.

  “Oh, it’s no big deal,” Perry said quickly. “It’s just that a couple of grad students like Jack and Laurie would never have a book like this—a condensed book.”

  Tom, the big man who looked like a stevedore, grabbed the book out of Perry’s hand, turned to the open side of the room that had no wall and hurled the book off the set.

  “I’m sorry,” said Larry, the fragile-looking man who served as Tom’s assistant. “I pick up books by the boxful to stock shelves like this, it usually doesn’t matter which books they really are.”

  “It doesn’t really matter here either,” said Ned. “The camera would never even pick up the title out of a whole shelf.”

  “It matters,” said Tom, “that Perry here knows it was the wrong book to be in this room. We want this room to feel right, to be right, down to the last thumbtack in Jack’s bulletin board.”

  Ned grinned and turned to Perry.

  “These guys are the best,” he said. “They’ll get anything you want, from stained glass windows to real lightning bugs in mason jars.”

  “We did that once,” Tom said proudly. “Got lightning bugs. For a ‘Waltons’ episode.”

  “Oh, we’ll get you whatever you want,” Larry said. “And don’t you hesitate to tell us if it isn’t just right, Mr. Moss. After all, you’re the creator.”

  Larry spoke the term with real awe.

  The creator liked that.

  He liked being recognized and appreciated, not only as a literary talent but now, for the first time in his life, the creator not only of stories but of jobs for all the people whose work it was to bring his fiction to life on film—the prop men like Tom and Larry, the set designer who built the living room he stood in, the set decorator who selected the furnishings, the location man who scouted places for exterior shooting, the camera crew that would soon begin shooting the two-hour script, the makeup people and hairdressers, the gofers and drivers, the whole array of men and women and their spouses and children who were now being supported, provided with food and clothing and medical benefits, all by the mere exercise of Perry’s talent.

  This was a far cry, a whole different order of experience and responsibility, from publishing a short story in the Hudson Review.

  The heady feeling of power and command increased when he and Ned stopped in Kenton’s office and saw the young director poring over the storyboard. The storyboard was like the master plan of any production, a long, graphlike chart showing each day of the shooting schedule, color-coded according to scenes, locations, and cast members. It was intricate and awesome, like some elaborate plan for the invasion of an enemy country, with troops and equipment amassed for carefully coordinated split-second action, yet all the more inspiring because this was not a campaign of destruction, but of creation.

  “After all, you’re the creator.”

  Larry’s awed reminder rang in Perry’s ears as he drove home from the studio that evening. Shooting was to start in two days. He had done it. He felt like celebrating.
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  After all, even creators took breaks. Perry had rarely even rested on the seventh day, and he’d now been out here working steadily, with concentration, for more than two months. In his focus on the all-consuming project he had paid little attention to Jane, and he felt now it was time for the creator’s wife, too, to get a break.

  Jane was at the table going over some contact prints with her magnifying glass.

  The ungracious thought came to the creator that she didn’t look much like a creator’s wife.

  He wasn’t sure what such a glorified creature should look like, but he thought something rather on the elegant side would seem appropriate. At least around cocktail time.

  Jane was wrapped in the fuzzy old bathrobe she wore around the house in winter, along with the matching pink bunny slippers. Perry hadn’t seen this outfit since Vermont, where it seemed warm and cuddly. Now, here in Southern California, it simply looked sad.

  The creator sat down with a sigh.

  “Lovey,” he said, “I thought you were only bringing back our summer clothes.”

  Jane looked up at him, then down at the tattered robe, automatically drawing it closer around herself, as if for protection.

  “This is comfy,” she said.

  “Mmmm.”

  He paused a moment, held back his comment and asked, “Like a drink?”

  “Thanks.”

  Perry made them both vodka and tonics, and sat down at the table with her. She was bent over the contacts again. Perry stoked up his pipe, trying to invoke in himself a reflective mood, a philosophic attitude.

  “I was thinking,” he said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Maybe we should buy some summer clothes.”

  “I brought our summer clothes out. We have everything.”

  “I meant new ones. You know. ‘California’ clothes.”

  Jane put down her magnifying glass, took a sip of her drink, and looked suspiciously at Perry.

  “What do you mean, ‘California’ clothes?”

  Perry shrugged, taking a sip of his own drink and trying to sound completely casual.

  “The kind they wear out here. More casual.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? We’re in California, aren’t we? Shouldn’t we dress as the Romans dress?”