Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  She gave him a pipe, a sweater, one of her new photographs, a pair of fur-lined moccasins he used to like to wear when he worked in his study, a first edition of Flannery O’Connor’s essays, a jar of his favorite Vermont maple syrup. He made the appropriate oohs and ahhhs of appreciation (as she had done when she opened her own presents) but there was something odd, out of kilter, about this whole transaction. It were as if each was making a silent statement by bringing to the other the treasures of the two distant lands they had come from—Marco Polo exchanging gifts with Pocahontas.

  Perry knew she wouldn’t want to go out to some fancy restaurant for Christmas dinner, yet he didn’t want her to have to cook in his tiny kitchenette with its all-electric appliances (like all real cooks, she preferred gas burners). He even considered making the stew she had taught him how to make when they met, yet felt it wasn’t festive enough.

  Ravenna had of course been the one with the answer to solve this culinary dilemma as she had all others: she knew a gourmet caterer who made up a splendid dinner of duck à l’orange with wild rice and puree of chestnut, and apple tart for dessert; all you had to do was heat it up.

  They drank two bottles of fine Chardonnay with dinner and had brandy after, and when they went into the small bedroom to lie down for a nap, their hands met and fingers interlocked. When Jane arrived the night before, she was too exhausted and too tense to make love, and besides, they still felt awkward with each other. Now, in the darkened bedroom, full of food and spirits, they moved toward one another, explored each other as if renewing acquaintance, rephrasing their bodies’ rapport, and joined, a bit awkwardly, after all that time of separation, but tenderly.

  They didn’t talk about “it” till the next day. Their future.

  They walked the water’s edge of the beach in Venice, as they had when they first came out. That was almost a year ago now. More like a century it seemed.

  “I miss you,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Like fury.”

  “You managed to hide it pretty well. I mean, I didn’t hear from you much, till the last few weeks.”

  “Well, I was all tied up with the show till then. All the upheavals. The whole mess.”

  “So you really mean you missed me when you didn’t have the show any more.”

  “Dammit, Jane. I don’t want to argue. I love you.”

  “I’m sorry. I love you too. I miss you all the time.”

  He stopped and hugged her to him, stroking his hand on her back.

  “Let’s be together.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  She took his hand and they began walking slowly again down the beach, in step with each other.

  “You know what my fantasy is?” Jane asked, pressing his hand.

  “Let’s see—that I throw you down in the surf and ravage you to insensibility as the tide comes in.”

  “Not sexual fantasy. I mean the ‘daily life’ kind.”

  “Whatever turns you on, love.”

  “Seriously. I was thinking, maybe you could get together on some project with Mona Halsted. She loves your stories, and I bet she’d love an excuse to come out and stay awhile.”

  Perry stopped walking and stared at Jane. She turned toward him and smiled as she continued, eagerly.

  “You could work at home, and Mona would come out and go over the script with you, and then you could fly back here for network, meetings if you needed to.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Perry asked.

  “I’m talking about the possibility of your working on a television project with Mona Halsted.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Don’t you remember? That wonderful woman producer we met at the Vardemans’ party. She went to Middlebury, and she loves Vermont. I know she would jump at the chance to come out on business, and besides, she’s a real fan of yours.”

  “Darling. That really is a fantasy, I’m afraid.”

  “Why? Why can’t it be true?”

  “There’s about a million reasons, believe me. I’m trying to do a feature right now, not television. Mona Halsted is nobody.”

  “She’s a bright, sensitive woman.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you about Mona Halsted’s virtues. That’s beside the point—she’s beside the point.”

  Jane turned and started walking again, faster now, and Perry kept up alongside her.

  “What is the point?” Jane asked.

  “The point is I need you here. I want you to come back and stay with me through the spring. To the end of summer at the latest. Then I guarantee we go back to Vermont for the fall semester.”

  Jane stopped again and folded her arms across her chest, looking at Perry with a squint.

  “I can’t believe you,” she said.

  “You don’t think I’m telling the truth?”

  “Oh, I know you are. I just can’t believe your proposal.”

  “What’s so weird about it? That I want my wife to be with me while I finish some important work?”

  “Important enough to give up your tenure for? This is it, you know. They won’t extend you any longer, and I don’t blame them.”

  “Love, this is the script for the Vardemans. This is real tenure—more money, in one lump, than I’d make for teaching for the next five years!”

  “So to hell with your obligation to Haviland. All the stories you told me of your loyalty to them, how they took you in when no one else would, gave you a home.”

  “I’m going back there next fall. Even if I only teach one course. I’ll be much more valuable to them.”

  “Because you’ll be rich?”

  “Because I’ll have done more, accomplished more, and in a way that will bring national acclaim!”

  She looked at him as if he had turned into Dracula’s nephew.

  “My God,” she said.

  She turned and started running down the beach. Perry ran after her, angrily, tackling her on the sand. Both of them were heaving, puffing, glaring, wanting to pound each other. Without a word, they stood up and brushed themselves off. They drove back to the condo in silence.

  That night was the Vardemans’ annual wassail buffet.

  Jane refused to go.

  Perry explained that he had no choice; it was business.

  “I understand,” Jane said.

  He left her lying on the couch, reading the Flannery O’Connor essays she had given him for Christmas. He kissed her on the cheek and promised to get back as soon as he could. He wanted to try to pick up the pieces, see if they couldn’t work something out, now that they’d had the explosion and got the hysterics out of their systems.

  The Vardemans’ wassail buffet seemed very restrained; there was more talk of deals than of Christmas. Vaughan introduced Perry to Evan Shurtleff, the Unified Films mogul. He was a crisp, pale-looking man with thin lips and piercing eyes.

  “I understand you worked with Archer Mellis,” he said.

  Perry felt the tips of his ears go red.

  “Yes, I did. Unfortunately, we didn’t part on the best of terms.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Still, if it weren’t for Archer, I wouldn’t be here. He’s a brilliant guy, and I owe him a lot.”

  “Of course.”

  Perry was going to change the subject to “The Springtime Women,” but Shurtleff turned his head slightly and smiled at someone who waved at him.

  “You’ll excuse me?” he said to Perry.

  “Of course.”

  Perry chugged his cup of wassail and got another. Damn. He wondered if Archer Mellis was bad-mouthing him around town. The arrogant prick. To hell with it. If this cold cucumber from Unified didn’t like him there were plenty of other places to go with a hot project like “The Springtime Women.” Especially with Harrison Ford wanting to do it. He looked for the popular star but didn’t spot him among the wassailers. He saw Meryl across the room and decided to go over and introduce himself and mention
“The Springtime Women.” Maybe Vaughan had an extra copy of the book upstairs and could lend it to her.

  Perry started edging his way through the crowd, shoulder first, when he bumped into the last person he wanted to encounter right now.

  Cyril Heathrow. He was wearing a tweed suit with knickers, looking like some damn Dickens character.

  “Ah, Mr. Moss,” he intoned, lifting his chin. “I understand you’ve bid adieu to the world of television. Or it, to you?”

  “The parting was mutual.”

  “What a loss,” Heathrow said brightly, lifting his wassail cup, “to your country’s culture.”

  “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut?”

  The Englishman whipped out a pad and pencil.

  “I adore you people’s colloquialisms,” he said.

  Perry went off in the crowd.

  This was not his night. He had two more cups of wassail, and didn’t even try the buffet. The combination of Shurtleff and Heathrow had obliterated any trace of his appetite. He was left in the crowd, without even being noticed, wanting urgently now to get back to Jane, to try to talk some sense into her. He rehearsed his arguments in his mind, went over his reasoning and logic, and decided the most important thing was to emphasize how damn much he really loved her.

  When he got back home, the lights were off in the condo. Maybe Jane was taking a nap. She was not in the bedroom, though. Or the living room. She had taken her suitcase. She had left the presents he gave her under the tree.

  She was gone.

  Perry needed a drink. He went to the fridge but the wine was also gone and the only thing he had was the bottle of champagne he had planned to use for making Mimosas for him and Jane the next morning. He opened it, and poured the bubbly into a tumbler. He sat down in the living room and tried to think what to do.

  Should he follow her home? Should he pick up the phone and book the next flight? He could probably get the red-eye to New York that was popular with show biz insiders, winging into the Big Apple at dawn. Then he could take the first shuttle up to Boston, rent a car at the airport, and drive north, maybe through a snowstorm, mushing himself on till he dropped in the driveway at home and was hauled inside by a loving Jane, bearing a cask of brandy around her neck.

  No. He was not going to run. He was not going to put his tail between his legs and slink away in the night. Sure, it might be fine that first night or two, making love in the big bed under the comforting pile of covers, sitting by the fire in the arms of his beloved and lovely wife. But then he’d have to face reality. His colleagues. He’d have to look them in the eye and admit defeat. He’d have to bear up to the dean’s smug sneer, the sympathetic coos of the faculty wives, the pats on the back of professors whose welcome was tempered with an unspoken “I told you so.”

  No. He was going to stick it out. He was going to hang in there until he got at least one picture made—“The Springtime Women” was just around the corner, for God sake—and then go back in triumph, in his own good time.

  In the meantime, he ought to call Al Cohen and just ask him to check on Jane when she got back, make sure she was OK. The trouble with that was, he’d have to tell Al he wasn’t coming back—yet again—for the spring semester. And that would bring up the whole ball of wax about tenure.

  Perry knew the dean would never give him another period of grace, that in effect he’d be giving up his tenure by failing to go back this time. He had already thought it through and was ready—even committed—to gambling on the greater kind of tenure that awaited him with the gold rush of his entry into feature films. Al Cohen would never begin to understand that, though, and he didn’t want to try to explain it or defend himself.

  He took several gulps of champagne and sat down right then and there and wrote to Al. He said he realized he was forfeiting his tenure, but his commitments in California prevented him from returning to Vermont at this time. He fully planned, though, to return for the fall semester and looked forward to teaching—if not his regular class load, at least his writing seminar, and perhaps, with department approval, beginning a new workshop on the craft of film writing. He felt sure it would be popular with the students, and in fact when word of it got around New England (there should be no problem getting a feature on it in the Boston Globe when the time was ripe), it might very well attract new students to Haviland. It would, in a sense, be a way for him to make up to the college for his extended absence.

  The letter, especially the new idea for the screenwriting workshop, eased his conscience. It also helped take his mind off Jane. He finished the bottle of champagne and collapsed into bed.

  “Trust me,” Ravenna said.

  Perry made a harsh kind of cackle.

  “Is that some kind of show business term, like ‘the bottom line’?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “‘Trust me.’ That’s what Archer Mellis always used to tell me.”

  “Don’t get paranoid, now.”

  “How can I not get paranoid when my old friend gives up on my movie after only one place turns it down?”

  “Vaughan has not given up on ‘The Springtime Women,’ he’s simply put it on the shelf for a while. And don’t say anything to him you’ll regret. He’s a good producer; he’s bankable.”

  “That fucking Mellis screwed this up. He bad-mouthed me to that snippy asshole from Unified, I know it.”

  “If you start trying to figure out who’s doing what to you and who else and why you’ll go nuts in this town,” Ravenna said. “Now settle down and eat your squab salad.”

  Perry sighed and took a sip of wine.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Listen, I really appreciate this—everything.”

  They were sitting at a table with a candle beside a lovely, lighted pool, in the back of a beautiful house in Beverly Hills. It was not Ravenna’s own house but one of her successful new actress clients had loaned it to her while she was shooting a film on location in Ecuador. Ravenna had canceled other plans and had Perry over to calm down and plan some solid strategy. He had called that morning and sounded like he was going to pieces after hearing the news that Vaughan had struck out at Unified with “The Springtime Women” before it had even got to the stage of a meeting with Perry. They simply said they already had two films in development set in Greenwich Village and could not at this time consider another.

  “I still don’t understand why Vaughan can’t get it going somewhere else with Harrison Ford as part of the deal.”

  “Darling, he’s not part of the deal.”

  “You mean Vaughan was lying to me?”

  “No, he told me Harrison in fact did read the story and liked it very much.”

  “So, doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “Someone of Harrison’s stature can’t commit to a project until he sees a script, darling. We’re not even close to that.”

  “So what am I supposed to do, twiddle my thumbs till Vaughan decides to get off his ass and try to do something with it again?”

  “Of course not. You’re going to try to get another of your stories into development.”

  “I haven’t even thought of one.”

  “That’s why you have a super agent, mister. This afternoon I looked through that book of stories you gave me and I know just what you should do. It would make a very nice little film, and it could be done for under eight.”

  That meant eight million, Perry knew now, and was a real bargain.

  “In fact,” Ravenna said, “I don’t know why you haven’t thought of this one yourself.”

  “Which one?”

  “‘Rich and Ripe’ of course.”

  It was a short story, almost a vignette, that was originally in Playboy, about a Boston matron who has a Harvard boy to tea, hoping to seduce him, but he has no idea what she has in mind and is shocked when it finally becomes apparent to him. He flees.

  “But nothing happens,” Perry said.

  “Darling, nothing happens in any
of your stories.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’t get sensitive, please. This is the seed of a delicious idea—in the film, of course, the matron succeeds in seducing the boy, and they have an absolutely splendid, hilarious affair. You’ll simply have to pitch it that way for producers.”

  “I’m not very good at that.”

  “Remember a marvelous little novel back in the sixties called One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding?”

  “Sure. Robert Gover. A preppy guy doesn’t understand this black girl he’s fallen for is a hooker, because he doesn’t know her language.”

  “See? In your story, the preppy doesn’t know the matron’s language. And you carry it through a whole affair, shooting on location in Boston.”

  “That’s not bad at all.”

  “Not bad? It’s beautiful.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I’ll send you on the rounds. The best producers in town. It won’t be easy, but I’ll pull it off.”

  “Why won’t it be easy? Is the word out against me? Because of my quitting the series?”

  “That’s nothing. People quit all the time. The problem is, you’re an unknown quantity.”

  “For God sake, I wrote a TV pilot that became a series, and I’ve written all those stories. My books.”

  “But none of that counts, you see. You haven’t done a feature.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s the business. But getting you in is my problem. Once you get in, though, you have to sell yourself.”

  “I have to tap dance.”

  “We all do.”

  Ravenna got up and shucked off the lounging robe she was wearing. She took off the bra of her bikini and made a perfect dive in the water.