Lucky Stars

by Jane Heller

  “Now, come on, Cookie,” he said with a chuckle. “Don’t oversell me to your daughter. I’m hardly a genius. I just enjoy a challenge.”

  “You are a genius,” she said. “And a handsome genius to boot.”

  “What about that face of yours?” he protested. “I’m not supposed to gloat that I landed the most beautiful woman ever to come out of Cleveland?”

  “Some beauty,” she said with a shrug.

  “Beauty and brains,” he added. “And humor and maturity.”

  I smiled tolerantly as they made goo-goo eyes at each other and spoke in baby talk. I couldn’t believe I was watching my own mother. She’d never been a sappy romantic, certainly not when she was married to my father, so this behavior of hers was a surprise, to put it mildly.

  “Tell me more about yourself, Victor,” I said, when they’d finished their back-and-forth about how handsome/beautiful they found each other. “Do you have children? Brothers and sisters? Any family here in L.A.?”

  “Regrettably, I don’t,” he said.

  “Victor was married years ago, dear,” said my mother, jumping in, “and his wife passed away without bearing children.” She looked at him with sad, adoring eyes, as if his pain were hers now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him.

  “It was very difficult to lose her,” he acknowledged, noisily enough so the diners at the next table turned around to look at him. I wondered if he might be hard of hearing, but decided he was just one of those people who compensates for being short by being loud. “But time does heal, as they say. I’ll never fully recover from her death, of course, but at some point I had to pull myself together and carry on.” He misted up here, causing my mother to pat his arm again. “Now,” he said, clearing his throat, “let’s not dwell on unpleasantness. We’re here to celebrate tonight, thanks to my first meeting with Stacey.”

  Basically, that’s how the evening went. Victor was solicitous of my mother and of me, and, in contrast to his goofy wardrobe, he had a sensible, self-deprecating way about him that was rather charming. I liked him, I realized halfway through dinner. Despite my initial reservations and whatever subconscious allegiance to my father I harbored, I actually liked the guy. He wasn’t a braggart, didn’t monopolize the conversation, wasn’t one of those me me me types that are ubiquitous in Hollywood, but showed an amazing restraint when it came to talking about himself and his accomplishments. Moreover, he didn’t throw himself at me in an attempt to make me accept him as my mother’s boyfriend. He simply expressed how attached he was to her, how much he cared about her well-being, and how he hoped I would be fine with that. He wasn’t an overt sleaze, in other words.

  “I don’t want you to worry about your mom,” he said as he was paying the check. “I know she and I have only known each other for a few months, but she’s in good hands with me, Stacey. Really.”

  I left the restaurant feeling fairly reassured.

  When I got home I called Maura. Since I’d started seeing Jack, I hadn’t spoken to her as often as before, and I missed her, missed her habit of putting things in their proper perspective.

  “Hi. I just had dinner with Mom’s new sex slave,” I said when she picked up.

  “And?” she asked.

  “He’s not bad at all,” I said. “I was prepared for some total operator, but he seems genuinely interested in my mother. Of course, she’s mad about him. And why not? He treats her like a goddess.”

  “It should only happen to me. So what’s he like? Good-looking?”

  “Sort of. He’s short and he’s got a little paunch and he desperately needs a wardrobe consultant, but he has a great smile and nice eyes, and he falls all over my mother. ”

  ‘Tell me this heartthrob’s name?”

  “Victor Chellus ”

  “Victor Chellus?”

  “Why? Do you know him, Maura?”

  “Know him? I slept with him.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Believe it, because it’s true.”

  Well, Victor was the right age for Maura, and everyone knows everyone in L.A. Still, it had never occurred to me that she would know him in the biblical sense.

  “When did you sleep with him?” I said. “A long time ago?”

  “About four months ago,” she said. “It was just a one-nighter, nothing serious, but he’s got a great house in Beverly Hills with a screening room and a chaise that converts into a bed.”

  “My mother told me all about the house,” I said, “and the chaise.” God, this was too creepy for words. “How did you meet him?”

  “At a party. He picked me up with some lame line like, ‘You’re too pretty to be standing here all by yourself.’ ”

  “Yuck. What made you fall for that?”

  “I was lonely. And he was attentive. And I go for the geezers, you know that.”

  “And he obviously goes for women younger than my mother. You say you were only with him that one night?”

  “Yeah. He took me back to his place and we watched a movie and fooled around and then he had his driver take me home.”

  “Did he call you after that?”

  “No. I figured he met someone else.”

  “He did meet someone else: my mother!”

  “Boy, this is small-world stuff, even for L.A.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is that four months ago, Victor was at a party picking up a woman in her thirties, and then, a mere month later, he was at a talent agency picking up a woman in her sixties—a woman he’s got wrapped around his stubby little finger at this very moment. Something’s wrong with this picture.”

  “Very wrong. The night I met him he was coming on to every chick in the place—every young chick. And now he’s madly in love with your mother? I hate to say it, but he could be after her for her money.”

  “But he has his own money, Maura. You just told me about the fancy house in Beverly Hills.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing. The bank could be foreclosing on the place for all we know. I’ve learned a lot about the people in this town, and the most important thing I’ve learned is that most of them aren’t what they seem and appearances are deceiving and you can’t tell a producer from a putz. I’d advise your mother to go slowly with this guy, if I were you.”

  “As if she would listen to anything I had to say,” I scoffed. “She’s as impulsive as I’ve always been, now that she’s Ms. Fin’s Premium Tuna Fish.”

  “Then make her listen. If Victor was such a hot producer, how come there isn’t a single credit for him on the Internet Movie Database?”

  “You checked?”

  “Yup. Right after our date. He’s not listed anywhere on that website.”

  “Well, he did say he was in other businesses, like real estate and financial investments. Maybe most of his money comes from those sources.”

  “Maybe and maybe not. Just keep an eye on him, would you?”

  “Maura, you’re scaring me. You’re supposed to be the one who views the glass as half-full all the time. Where’s the eternal optimist when I need her?”

  “I’m here,” said my friend. “But I’m telling you that guys who try to score with women our age typically aren’t interested in women your mother’s age. Unless they have an ulterior motive.”

  “And you think that ulterior motive is money?”

  “Could be.”

  “Then why would he chase after my mother? She’s done very well very quickly, but she’s not exactly the richest woman in Hollywood.”

  “No, but she’s probably the most gullible. She’s new to all the nonsense, Stacey. For all her bluntness and bluster, she’s totally naive when it comes to the kind of manipulating that goes on here. In other words, she’s easy prey.”

  I sighed. “Victor was awfully nice at dinner.”

  “Look, it’s possible that he is nice and that we’re overthinking the situation.”

  “You’re right. In the meantime, I’ll try to do some nosing a
round about him. Oh, and Jack promised to make some inquiries.”

  “Speaking of loverboy, how are things between you two?”

  “Pure bliss. I’ve never been happier, Maura. I know the relationship is still young, but Jack is different from the others, I can tell. It’s Victor I’m worried about.”

  “Then make it your mission to get all the information you can about him. Your mother would do that for you, if your positions were reversed.”

  They are reversed, I thought, not for the first time.

  eighteen

  “I’ll take these cocktail napkins,” said the woman, a walking Ralph Lauren logo. There was a Polo man on her turtleneck, a Polo man on her jeans, and a Polo man on her handbag. There was even a Polo man on her Yorkshire terrier, who was encased in a tiny tartan plaid sweater. She was a regular customer at Cornucopia! and, despite the expensive wardrobe, she was hilariously cheap. “This is a house gift, so make sure you put a really big bow on it.” The napkins were paper, not cloth, and cost a whopping five dollars, but she was trying to impress her hostess by going heavy on our free wrapping.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, taking the napkins into the stockroom.

  I was wrapping the package and putting a really big bow on it when I overheard Cameron sucking up to a customer just outside the stockroom door. A male customer.

  “Why, it’s Mr. Chellus. How nice to see you again,” she said.

  I stopped what I was doing, obviously, and craned my neck to get a better listen. At first I assumed Victor had come to the store to see me, figuring that my mother had told him I worked there. But he didn’t ask for me or even mention my name.

  “Nice to see you again, too, Cameron!” thundered Victor, who was either a very good customer of Cornucopia! or an acquaintance of Cameron’s. Perhaps more than an acquaintance. “How’s business?”

  “Great,” she said. “We’re so busy we can hardly keep our salespeople from collapsing.” She had that right. “What brings you here today? A gift for one of your lovely ladies?”

  One of his lovely ladies?

  “One lovely lady,” said Victor with a chuckle. “It’s not her birthday. I’d just like to surprise her with a treat of some sort, to show her I was thinking of her. Any ideas?”

  Cameron took his arm and guided him around the store, out of earshot, damn it. I tried to at least follow them visually, from my post in the stockroom, but the customer with the Ralph Lauren obsession kept yelling, “Where’s my package? Do you people hire the handicapped to wrap your gifts or what?” Very politically correct. I wanted to strangle her with the gold ribbon I was winding around my right hand.

  “I’ll be right out,” I shouted back, hoping to shut her up.

  Meanwhile, Cameron led Victor to this counter and that section, and within minutes he had made a selection. Cameron came running into the stockroom with a set of English bath soaps and body lotions and told me to wrap them as a gift.

  “But I’ve got to give this to the customer who’s been waiting,” I said, nodding at the cocktail napkins.

  “I’ll take them to her. You start on the bath products, and bring them out when you’re done,” she said, grabbing the napkins and turning on her heel.

  Well, there was no point in hiding in the stockroom, I decided, no point in keeping my presence a secret from Victor. So I wrapped his items, took a deep breath, and walked over to him.

  “Stacey!” He seemed very surprised to see me, which confirmed that my mother hadn’t told him where I worked. “What an unexpected pleasure!”

  “I’m a part-timer here,” I explained, as I handed him his gifts. Today’s wardrobe involved a lime green blazer with pale blue slacks. It would have been over the top for most Angelinos, for whom black and beige were the rule, but it was sedate for Victor. “So you’ve been shopping?”

  He pressed his forefinger to his lips. “Promise you won’t tip your mother off? I’m giving this to her tonight, before we go out for dinner.”

  “I promise.”

  “I thought I’d buy her a little treat. She resists the sort of lavish gifts I’d prefer to give her, so I have to keep coming up with more mundane presents. Bath soaps!” He laughed. “Cameron’s idea.”

  “I’m sure my mother will be very appreciative,” I said, “since she’s a bath person, as opposed to a shower person.” But then he must have known that, given that the two of them were, uh, intimate.

  Victor and I chatted about nothing—he was friendly and, once again, disarmingly self-deprecating—and then he took off.

  He seems like such a decent guy, I thought, trying to make my impression of him jibe with Maura’s information about him. And then there was Cameron’s remark, indicating that he often bought gifts for his “ladies.” What was the deal with Victor? I had to know, had to find out for my mother’s sake, before he broke her heart.

  The minute Cameron ducked out of the store to run some errands, I hurried over to the computer, where all the customers’ names and addresses were available on a database, along with the items they’d purchased and the dates they’d purchased them.

  Okay, where are you, Victor? I thought, scrolling down through the As, Bs, and Cs.

  Bingo. There he was, between Robin Charon, the customer who’d ordered enough stationery to wallpaper the entire store, and Ellen Cheppel, the customer with an apparent addiction to table linens.

  My eyes widened as I saw what a good customer Victor was. Too good a customer. Long before he’d met my mother, he’d been buying English bath soaps and other goodies for women. And his purchases weren’t just ancient history; his most recent one actually overlapped with the time period during which he’d started seeing Mom.

  This did not make me happy, and so I tried to excuse away what was staring me in the face. Maybe Victor was merely one of those generous types who routinely hands out thank-you gifts to his secretaries and cleaning ladies, as well as others among his support staff. Or maybe the purchases were business gifts; if he really had produced movies, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for him to have bought pretty little trinkets for the female studio executives he was trying to win over. Or maybe he’d just dated a lot of women before he met my mother. Maybe he’d been depressed, being a widower with no children to dote on, and he’d sought to ease his emptiness by bestowing gifts on members of the opposite sex. But now he had found my mother and they were a loving couple and his randy, runaround days were behind him. Righty-o, Stacey.

  I brought all of this inner turmoil home that night and dumped it in Jack’s lap. He and I had just enjoyed a thrilling roll in the hay, speaking of randy, and while we were putting our clothes back on, I reported on what I’d learned about Victor.

  “What do you think?” I asked. “Is he using my mother?”

  “I doubt it. Just because he dated your friend Maura and a series of other younger women doesn’t mean he isn’t sincere in his affection for Helen. Maybe he was a lonely widower who wanted to play the field before jumping back into a committed relationship with a woman his own age.”

  “Maybe. By the way, you promised to ask around about him. Any feedback?”

  “Not so far.”

  “But he said he used to be a producer.”

  Jack shrugged. “He could have been more of a fundraiser—the schmoozer type who ropes his friends into throwing a few thousand into a picture and then walks around telling everyone he’s a producer.”

  “I suppose that could be the case. In fact, his precise words to me the other night were: ‘I’m pretty good at squeezing money out of people.’ He was involved in a lot of businesses, apparently.”

  “See?”

  “Yeah, I just don’t want the latest person he squeezes money out of to be my mother.”

  Jack drew me to him, wrapped me in his arms. “I understand that you want to protect Helen, but if Victor Chellus isn’t the saint you’d like him to be, she’ll find out in time. She’s a grown woman, Stacey. She can take care of hers
elf.”

  “No, she can’t. She’s very vulnerable right now. She might as well be a teenager for all the experience she’s had with men.”

  “I take it she was protective of you when you were a teenager?”

  “Protective? She used to frisk my dates.”

  He laughed. “Are you sure she wasn’t copping a feel?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “What was she checking them for? Condoms?”

  “No. She was checking them for wallets. In those days she wanted me to marry well. Now she just wants me to marry, period.”

  He laughed again. “You realize that by snooping around Victor, you’re meddling in her life the way she meddled in yours? I think you ought to let him be, just let his relationship with Helen play out.”

  Yeah, sure. My mother didn’t raise me to be a woman who lets things play out. She frisked my dates and I was going to frisk hers, figuratively speaking.

  About a week later, my mother suggested another dinner with Victor. I agreed and invited Jack to come along. He declined, citing his workload, even though I pleaded and cajoled and tried to make him feel guilty (I inherited this trick from Mom).

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” I teased. “We can fondle each other under the table.”

  “I’d rather fondle you without your mother hovering,” he said.

  “I know, but I really want you to meet Victor, so you can give me your unbiased opinion of him. I also want my mother to get to know you better.”

  “And why’s that? Are you thinking of keeping me around a while?”

  I blinked in response to his question. He made it sound as if our continuing on together was my choice— an entirely new concept for me. Based on my previous romantic disasters, I had come to believe that it was up to the man to either love me or dump me; that I was just this passive blob who had no say at all in matters of the heart. I’d fall hard, hope the feeling would be mutual, and end up disappointed, so where was my power, my choice? Was Jack telling me without telling me that he was in the relationship for the long haul and that if we were ever to part company, it would be up to me to say good-bye? Inconceivable.