Lala Pettibone's Act Two

by Heidi Mastrogiovanni

  Lala Pettibone’s

  Act Two

  Heidi Mastrogiovanni

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York, New York

  Merde Storm

  The Ides of March were about to slap the stuffing out of Lala Pettibone. And she didn’t see it coming. Not at all.

  On the fourteenth of March, Lala went out to dinner with her best friend. Lala and Brenda had gone to high school together in Santa Monica, California, and then opted to go to college on the East Coast, at schools very close to each other. Close enough that it took only a short drive to Brenda’s campus for Lala to lose her virginity on Valentine’s Day during her freshman year.

  “I wish we’d had e-mail back then,” Lala often mused, when she remembered the exceedingly bittersweet experience. “I could have written him a curt, brilliant, sexy missive telling him what a douchebag he was for never calling me after we had sex for my first time. I could have posted it on Facebook.”

  And then Lala would reflect a bit more and conclude that some things really probably are better left unsaid.

  Lala lived in Greenwich Village, and Brenda lived on the Upper West Side. Neither of them had ever wanted to return to Southern California once they had escaped.

  “I don’t mind visiting LA,” Brenda would often say.

  “Me neither,” Lala would agree. “But for a week, tops. After that, I start to get itchy being around so much space and sunshine.”

  Brenda and her husband, Frank, were significantly wealthy. They lived in an unbelievable apartment near Lincoln Center. Frank had inherited it from his parents. Lala loved to tell anyone who would listen how palatial her best friend’s apartment was.

  “The first time I went there? Brenda gave me a tour and, I swear to God, if she hadn’t escorted me back to the front door at the end of the evening, I would have never gotten out of there. It’s like a huge maze of rooms and doors and more rooms and more doors. And hallways. Hallways that go on forever. I swear, I’d still be there now if Brenda hadn’t shown me the way out.”

  Brenda always tried to pay for dinner and anything else they did together, including spa weekends in Montauk, but Lala never let her.

  “I’m not poor, okay?” Lala would huff and then feel guilty for being so sensitive in the face of her best friend’s grace and generosity. “I can take responsibility for my life decisions.”

  Lala’s life decisions had included knowing from a very early age that she didn’t want to have children. Lala loved kids, but she knew she didn’t have the patience to be a parent. She preferred being a fabulous aunt in the vein of Mame, and spoiling her actual nieces and nephews, along with all of her friends’ kids, whom she counted as nieces and nephews too.

  “They will all take turns taking care of me in my dotage,” Lala would often say. “Because they all love me so much because I’m so much fun, and I never scold them or tell them ‘no’ unless their safety or health is threatened while they’re in my care. I’ll live in a charming guesthouse on their massive grounds in Larchmont, or I’ll have my own suite in their fabulous townhouse on Sutton Place. Because I’m envisioning that they’ll all be quite successful, largely due to the positive influence of their Aunt Lala. And I’ll host weekly salons, and I’ll say provocative things that sound cute because I’m so ancient. Like that weird stuff that comes out of Yoda’s mouth, which is really quite endearing. New York Magazine will write a profile of me, and they’ll come up with some kind of moniker like ‘The Last of the Great Ol’ Broads.’”

  Lala’s life decisions had also included not going to law school or graduate school. Lala spent the first decade of her post-collegiate life in Manhattan working toward a career on stage and screen.

  “My success as an actress,” she would often explain in the ensuing years, “was greatly hampered by my lack of any actual acting talent.”

  The turning point came one morning when she was dressing to go to an audition for a soap opera, and she had a panic attack that ended with her cutting every item of clothing she owned into tiny, heart-shaped pieces. She had to be stopped from leaving her building and getting into a taxi to go to the audition—wearing only a wristwatch, a necklace, and a pair of pumps—by a kindly neighbor who, mercifully, was heading down to the laundry room just as Lala was locking the door to her apartment behind her.

  “Apparently, I didn’t much care for the audition process,” Lala would later explain. “Who knew?”

  Lala’s best life decision up to that fateful March 15th had been to marry Terrence. He was a playwright she met while doing summer stock, and he was sexy and brilliant. Best of all, he rekindled in her a love affair with words.

  “I had written some in college,” Lala said, “but it was shit. Absolute shit. Self-conscious and precious and affected. When I read that stuff now, I want to slit my wrists to avoid dying of embarrassment.”

  Terrence wrote beautiful works that had been produced at small theaters all over the country and in Canada. He won an Obie award for Best New American Play. He never made a solid or even decent living at his craft, but he and Lala were deliriously happy. They lived in a classic, fifth-floor walkup with a bathtub in the kitchen in the East 60s.

  Lala’s parents were comfortably well-off, and Lala was their only child (it was by marrying Terrence that she had gotten those nieces and nephews she loved to spoil), so they sent very generous birthday and Christmas gifts. But Lala had never lived the life of privilege that so many of her classmates from Wesleyan enjoyed.

  Lala’s parents had immigrated to the States from England, where the still-thriving class system had made her near-anarchist father red-faced with rage.

  “I’ll kill ‘em,” her father would declare. Frequently. More often than not, without any provocation. Whatsoever. “All of the aristos. I’ll kill ‘em all, I tell ye.”

  “That’s lovely, dear,” Lala’s mother would chirp, never for a moment taking her eyes a millimeter away from the shenanigans on EastEnders. “We’re feeling very A Tale of Two Cities again today, are we?”

  Her parents taught at Santa Monica College until they retired. Her father was a mathematician, and her mom chaired the history department.

  Lala and her parents had descended from non-observant Jews who had escaped to the United Kingdom from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. It was from her grandmother’s use of Yiddish that Lala first received her great gift: a love of language. She had treasured memories of her Bubbe Esther saying, “Don’t hock me in chanik,” in a Cockney accent that could have rivaled Eliza Doolittle’s, pre-transformation.

  After she met Terrence, Lala started writing again. She started reading all the books about writing that Terrence recommended. She stopped acting, and she spent lots of the time she wasn’t working as an office temp to make money at the small desk in their small living room that she shared with Terrence. His side of the desk was “covered with crap, I mean, constantly.” It drove Lala crazy. On the side of the desk over which Lala exercised hegemony, the stapler was never empty, the paperclips were always kept in a small porcelain cup, and Terrence’s hand was always swatted if he tried to touch anything.

  Lala had two short stories published in The New Yorker. After the first one was accepted, she sent out a letter to every literary agent in New York announcing her success, and asking if they wanted to read her collection of short stories, Dressed Like a Lady, Drinks Like a Pig. She got only one response. It was a form letter saying that her book was not what they were looking for, but they wished her every success with finding an agent who had more enthusiasm for her work.

  “Barf,” Lala said, after she read
the form letter aloud to Terrence.

  “Fuck it,” Terrence said. “We don’t need them. We’ve got each other, and we’ve got tomorrow, and so I say, fuck it, yes, indeed, fuck it, because we’ve got everything we need.”

  “At least their timing wasn’t so shitty that it ruined our celebration.”

  Three weeks after Lala’s first story had been accepted, and three days before the form letter had arrived, Lala and Terrence went to their favorite café to honor their anniversary. Two bottles of champagne later, they stumbled home and had the best sex they’d ever had. Of their lives. Their lives together. Their married lives together.

  “Remember that time in Big Sur, right after we stopped dating other people?”

  “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Like I could forget.”

  “Like I could.”

  “But married sex is great.”

  “It’s not fair to even compare it with unhitched sex.”

  “Apples and oranges.”

  “Indeed.”

  Thirteen years into their marriage, Terrence was diagnosed with stage-four stomach cancer. He died in less than six months.

  “I wouldn’t trade the lessons I learned when Terrence got sick,” Lala often said. “I just wish he didn’t have to die so I could learn them.”

  People would frequently ask Lala if she could give them a general idea of what those lessons were, and Lala would respond that she most certainly could, “because I’ve given this considerable thought between daily and sometimes hourly crying jags, jags that, by the way, make me wonder if it’s possible to die from crying, because it certainly feels like it’s possible. My encapsulated version of the lessons would be, fucking pay attention while you have the chance. Pay attention every single damn day. Notice and cherish and honor those people and those things for which you are grateful. Don’t assume they’ll be around forever. Because you never know. Trust me on this. You never ever ever know.”

  After Terrence died, lots of people, from close friends to family to colleagues to casual acquaintances, asked Lala if she would be moving home now.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Lala would respond.

  “Home,” they would say. “Back to Los Angeles.”

  “New York is my home,” Lala told them. “It was when Terrence was alive, and it is now.”

  _______________

  Lala and Brenda decided to go to their favorite Mexican restaurant on Hudson Street. The bartender knew how to create a scratch margarita that was smooth enough to make the amount of tequila that was, in fact, in it come as a big surprise when you stood up after drinking them like lemonade.

  Lala had her usual problems dressing for an evening out. Or dressing for anything, really.

  “I have so many friends who have excellent taste in clothes,” Lala often said. “They know how to put pieces together and make these fabulous, inventive ensembles. I can barely dress myself. It’s why I have so many black clothes. It’s just so much easier.”

  Lala stood in front of the full-length mirror in her small, but very charming, one-bedroom co-op. Lala’s parents had died five years before, just after she turned forty. They had flown to New York to celebrate their only child’s milestone birthday, and it had been a truly wonderful and memorable visit. Clarissa and George Pettibone had more energy than many of Lala’s friends. They were sweet and quick-witted and everyone loved them. Brenda threw a big birthday party for Lala at her unbelievable apartment. Two months after Lala’s parents returned to Los Angeles, Clarissa died suddenly of a heart attack. Lala flew out immediately. While she was there helping her dad adjust to being a widower, George went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up the next morning. It was exactly two weeks to the day after the passing of his wife of almost fifty years.

  “Seriously, is that the way to go, or what?” Lala said at the West Coast memorial for her parents and at the less formal one Brenda hosted after Lala returned to New York. “My parents were in great shape right up to the end, and they adored each other, and I don’t think they ever spent a night apart after they were married.”

  And then Lala would add, “My parents’ marriage has been an ongoing reproach to my life since Terrence died. And I mean that in the very best and most loving sense of the phrase ‘ongoing reproach.’”

  After Terrence died, Lala alternated between long periods of having no romance at all in her life, and longer periods of dating men who lived in other cities, often cities that were quite far from New York. The winner of the longest-distance award was Danny from New Zealand. They had met through mutual friends, and they were an item for three years—if seeing each other twice a year and screwing all week can constitute being an item.

  “Is anyone surprised?” Lala would ask her friends. “I’m not ready for a relationship. I don’t care if it’s been ten years. I lost the love of my life. I feel much more comfortable with a boyfriend when we’ve got several thousand miles of ocean and a very long plane ride between us.”

  After Lala’s parents died, she sold their cute, little cottage in the easternmost part of Santa Monica and netted enough profit to buy her one-bedroom co-op in the Bancroft, one of the most sought-after locations in Greenwich Village. It was a beautiful old building with thick walls and thick ceilings and thick floors, and it had a doorman and an elevator. Lala bought a stacked washer and dryer that just managed to fit into her bathroom, and she even splurged on an interior designer who was a friend of a friend and gave her a great deal. She worked with her to create a light and warm—but above all functional and uncluttered—atmosphere.

  As Lala stared in the mirror at her latest attempt to put together a cute outfit, her ancient beagle, Petunia, and her not-quite-as-old dachshund, Yootza, a sable-hued meatloaf on four chubby drumsticks, dozed on the bed. Lala had adopted them both from the ASPCA two years earlier when Petunia was nine and Yootza was five. They did not come with those names. At the shelter, Petunia was called Jasmine and Yootza was called Jerry.

  “He looks like a Yootza to me,” Lala said. She was sitting at a desk in the reception area filling out the paperwork while Jerry sat on her lap staring at her. “I have no idea where I came up with that. I have no idea what it means. Jerry must have told me. He must be screaming right now, ‘My name is not Jerry, it’s Yootza!’ And I’m hearing him. Wow, that’s pretty amazing.”

  Lala had always had pets. When she was growing up, her parents valued volunteer work as much as they treasured leftist politics, so Lala started working at an animal shelter near their house on weekends when she was just out of elementary school. As she got older, and certainly by the time she was out of college and on her own, Lala started to gravitate toward the older animals who needed homes.

  “Of course I love puppies and kittens,” Lala explained to the adoption counselor at the ASPCA who was overseeing her application for Jasmine and Jerry. “Who doesn’t love them? They’re so adorable, for heaven’s sake, but my god are they a lot of work. Me, I’ve preferred the gray faces for as long as I can remember. My last six dogs were almost ten years old when I rescued them, and I still got another five good years with each of them, and that was especially amazing because one of them was a mastiff, and you know the big dogs generally don’t live as long as the small dogs. Emily was beautiful. I had her until she was fourteen. I can’t talk about her anymore, or I’ll start wailing.”

  Lala’s capacity for empathy didn’t extend only to sentient beings. She always worried that the last aspirin in the bottle might be lonely, and maybe she should just go ahead and increase the dose she was taking so as not to leave the poor pill bereft of companionship.

  Lala took off the light blue shirt that kind of still fit her and kind of looked okay but really didn’t. She turned away from the mirror and looked over her shoulder at the reflection.

  “Hmm . . .
Well, okay. Hmm.”

  Lala walked everywhere, and she also went to the gym every day where she got her heart rate up to a level that made her sweat for at least half an hour. On alternate days she did strength training, and she always got in at least one yoga or Pilates class every week.

  But Lala was short, and she loved to eat and drink, and she was never going to slow down with either of those delightful activities, so she had gotten a bit rounder as she had gotten older.

  “I do like that my boobs are finally bigger,” Lala reflected. She continued to stare at herself. “And I am grateful for and stunned by the fact that I don’t yet have gray hair.”

  Yootza opened his eyes and let out a big sigh.

  “Yootza, please do not roll your eyes at me. This is my true shade of medium golden brown. It has been my true shade of medium golden brown since adolescence. I do not appreciate your skepticism.”

  Lala sat down on the bed next to Yootza and scratched under his little chin.

  Yootza had an underbite. That had sealed the deal the moment Lala saw it at the shelter.

  “Mother of God, he’s got an underbite!” she brayed at the staff. “Why hasn’t anyone snapped this guy up before? Yeah, well, their loss.”

  “Mama’s short, Yootza,” Lala explained. She used her other hand to rub sleeping Petunia’s belly. “Though Mama has unusually long legs. Mama’s legs are nearly as long as Auntie Brenda’s, and you know Auntie Brenda is at least half a foot taller than Mama. That’s because Mama is so short-waisted. Mama’s boobs just basically rest on Mama’s hips. And that’s why clothes tend to look odd on Mama. What time is it? I’m going to be late.”

  Lala stood up and marched over to her walk-in closet. It was a small space that required a stretching of the definition of “walk-in” to include taking maybe three shuffling steps from the door, but by New York standards it was something special. She pulled a pair of black pants off their hanger, and she grabbed a black top with red trim. The material on each of the pieces was comfortable, and the fit was not too tight. Lala put on a cute, little pair of red pumps and once again studied herself in the mirror.