Some Nerve

by Jane Heller

  “Feast?” I said skeptically. He had a personal chef at home. The hospital’s kitchen was hardly up to his standards.

  “I had a talk with the dietician,” he said. “We’ll be dining on paillard of chicken, potato purée, and a medley of spring vegetables, with chocolate mousse for dessert.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think I’ve met this particular dietician. Are you sure she works here?”

  As I sat in the chair he’d pulled out for me, he whispered in my ear, “The truth is, I didn’t get anywhere with the dietician, except that she agreed to have the food delivered at six-thirty instead of the usual five sharp.”

  I looked up into his face, inhaling his cologne in the process. I felt light-headed from pure excitement, not panic, as if my body might levitate off the chair. “So what is the menu?”

  “We’re having leathery chicken breast, gluey mashed potatoes, and tasteless succotash.”

  “And the chocolate mousse?”

  “Pudding. The stuff that comes in those little cups.”

  I laughed and surveyed the offerings on the table. Yes, they were the same old hospital staples, but he’d actually made them look appetizing. He’d put everything in the serving dishes with the foil domes, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was dining anyplace other than a hospital. “You’re very creative,” I said as he poured the bottled water into our glasses.

  “Maybe it’s all that time I’ve spent on movie sets where people are paid to make things look more appealing than they really are.”

  He was about to sit down next to me when he stopped in his tracks. “Oh. I forgot the pièce de résistance.”

  He walked over to the closet, grabbed something, hid it behind his back, and returned to the table. “Ta-da!” The secret object turned out to be a flashlight. He flipped it on and set it down on the table, light side up. “Since candles are a no-no here, we’ll have to use our imaginations.”

  Oh, I was using my imagination, all right. As he sat beside me and began to spoon the various items onto my plate, I pictured myself in Beverly Hills, eating with him at Spago. I also pictured him raising his champagne glass and toasting us, toasting our future. I pictured him stroking my thigh under the table. And I pictured him doing all this with a thin gold wedding band on his finger—the same ring I wore. Yeah, I was totally hooked, and the evening had only just begun.

  We spent the entire meal in each other’s thrall, the radio station turning out song after song in the background. For some reason—maybe because we knew that Malcolm would be going home in two days and there wasn’t much time for mundane chatter—we went straight to the heart of the matter, which was that we were two people who’d connected in a way we’d never connected with anyone else before. He stated unequivocally that his heart condition and subsequent infection had changed him profoundly and that what he was looking for in a partner had changed too; that if we’d met earlier in his life he wouldn’t have been ready for someone as straight talking as me. (I could hardly bring up the fact both that he had met me earlier in his life and that I wasn’t as straight talking as he thought.) I stated unequivocally that volunteering at Heartland General had forced me to confront my fears and put the needs of others ahead of my own. (I could hardly bring up the fact that one of my own needs had to do with my career as an entertainment journalist and that a story I’d written about him was still sitting in my computer’s Drafts folder.)

  And, of course, we talked about his former significant other. He told me he’d called Rebecca to state clearly that they were finished and that she’d handled it better than he’d expected, and I admitted that I hadn’t liked her very much.

  At one point, our conversation drifted back to the hospital. He asked me about the other patients I visited regularly and I told him about Bree Wiley, about her positive attitude and inspiring courage, particularly in the face of her prolonged, desperately frustrating wait for a new liver. “She never gives up, never complains,” I said. “All she wants to do is go to Hollywood and meet movie stars.”

  “Here’s a promise,” he said. “As soon as she’s well enough, I’ll fly her and her family to L.A.—all expenses paid.”

  “Really?” I gazed at him as adoringly as I’d once glowered at him. “You said you didn’t have much direct contact with fans.”

  “That was the old me. I was a selfish, reclusive ass. But the new me is making a promise that I’ll keep—a promise I never would have made if I hadn’t landed in this place and met you, Ann.”

  It continued on like that—the trading of compliments, the flirtatious glances—right through to the chocolate pudding. And then Malcolm suggested we take a walk together. Hand in hand, we strolled down the nearly empty hall, stopping only to peer out the floor-to-ceiling window near the elevators. It was a clear night and the stars were dotting the sky and we could see a sliver of the lake glistening in the distance.

  “I used to think the Midwest was one big cow pasture, but this is pretty country,” he said. “How would you feel about leaving it?”

  I turned toward him, my heart pumping very fast. “Leaving it?”

  “Not permanently, but we’ve got to make some plans,” he said. “If we’re gonna keep this magic going, either I’ll come here to spend time with you or you’ll come to L.A. to spend time with me. Or both.” Ever so lightly, he brushed my hair back with his fingertips. “You do want to keep it going, don’t you?”

  “You know I do,” I said, feeling limp whenever he touched me. I also felt like a world-class fraud. If I went to L.A. to visit him, I’d have to pretend that I’d never been there.

  “Then we’ll have a commuter relationship for now,” he said.

  So I’d go from avoiding airplanes to practically living on them, talk about a turn of events. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we can be together after you leave the hospital.”

  “Glad we’re on the same page about that.”

  Page. I tensed when I thought of how I’d almost blown my chance at a relationship with Malcolm for a chance at a second career at Famous. There was no contest as to which I would choose now. Still, I knew I’d have to tell him the truth about my former life, as I’ve already said. I wasn’t completely without a conscience, nor did I believe we could succeed as a couple unless I told him. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it on our first date, couldn’t break the spell. Not yet.

  I’ll tell him tomorrow, I vowed. I’ll apologize for deceiving him and allay his concerns and make him understand that I too have changed. Yes.

  When we returned to 613, I asked him if he was tired, considering that he was recovering from an infection.

  “My battery’s draining a little,” he admitted. “But I’ve got enough juice for a dance.”

  I laughed. “A dance?”

  He turned up the volume on the radio. The song was Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” one of the great love ballads from the fifties. “I couldn’t have said it better,” he murmured, taking me in his arms.

  There wasn’t much room for dancing, but we carved out a little space at the foot of his bed. We held each other and swayed to the song, our bodies moving in perfect sync. Malcolm hummed the soulful melody in my ear as we danced, and I gave myself over to the music and to him. I couldn’t imagine ever having felt so absolutely, incontrovertibly happy. I didn’t want to be anywhere else, with anyone else. I was in a bubble of bliss.

  “‘You send me,’” he whispered, echoing the lyrics. “‘Honest you do.’”

  And then he lowered his head and kissed me. I’d been wanting him to kiss me, had been craving the kiss, and when it finally came I thought I’d pass out from sheer relief. The fact that it was also a luscious, stirring, seemingly endless kiss only added to my rapture.

  So much for my No Actors rule. Oddly, it didn’t even occur to me to obsess about all the movie goddesses he’d kissed on screen. Those images of him became irrelevant the instant his lips met mine. I was too engrossed in the moment to feel jeal
ousy or insecurity—too captivated by the exquisite sensations of his mouth, his tongue, his skin, his smell commingling with my own.

  I was so carried away that I reached inside his bathrobe to touch his chest and his back. I was not a physically demonstrative person and yet I was desperate to touch him everywhere.

  Breathless, I said, “I never expected—”

  He silenced me with another wave of kisses, and again I lost myself in him.

  We were going at it with such passion that we toppled onto the bed in a heap, laughing as we groped each other. We must have been so oblivious to the outside world that we didn’t hear the knock on the door.

  “Just takin’ the dinner away,” said the woman in the shower cap whose job it was to collect everybody’s dishes. Her eyes widened as she walked in and caught us in bed (on the bed), and she started waving her hands in the air and shouting, “This ain’t right! I gotta tell a nurse!”

  I sprang up and tried to calm her down, explaining that the patient and I were just saying good night, that there was nothing to bother a nurse about. Malcolm employed another strategy with her, which was to offer her one of his many gift-shop purchases in exchange for her silence. The idea of a freebie appealed to her. She chose the portable radio and left without incident.

  After she was gone, I told Malcolm about the time I’d walked in on a randy couple and how I’d called a code gray on them. “There’s a certain symmetry to this,” I joked.

  “There’s a certain symmetry to us,” he said, wrapping me in his arms. “I know this sounds crazy, but it’s almost as if we had a history together. Maybe in a previous life or something.”

  Yes, I would tell him the truth in the morning, but for the rest of the night he was mine.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I woke up on Sunday morning with a love hangover. Instead of getting out of bed and starting the day, I luxuriated under the covers, indulging myself with replays of Saturday night. I blushed as I relived it all, every second, every kiss, and could only shake my head in wonderment when I thought about how unlikely it was that Malcolm Goddard and I were speaking to each other, let alone planning our future together.

  It wasn’t until the phone rang in the hallway, just outside my bedroom door, that I decided to rouse myself and get some breakfast. Now that my mother had taken the giant leap of leaving the house to walk to the mailbox, she was fielding offers from friends who were eager to drive her wherever she wanted to go. I figured the call was from one of her would be chauffeurs.

  “My, my. Someone slept late,” Grandma Raysa tsk-tsked when I finally appeared in the kitchen. The ladies of the house were all in attendance, cleaning. Mom was scouring the stove. Aunt Toni was wiping down the counters. And my grandmother was spraying every visible surface. “It’s almost noon. We thought you died.”

  “You came home after we were all asleep, so we couldn’t see what condition you were in,” said my aunt, giving me the once-over. “Did you and this Jeanette do a little too much partying?”

  “No,” I said dreamily. “I was just being lazy this morning.”

  “You’re entitled to be lazy, sweetie,” said my mother, who had traded in her bathrobes for polyester workout clothes.

  “I think your lazy days just might be over,” said Grandma Raysa.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Your former boss called,” said my mother. “I told him you were still in bed and couldn’t be disturbed.”

  “What?” I grabbed the arm of a chair to steady myself.

  “Harvey Whatever-his-name-is,” said Mom. “Your boss at the magazine.”

  “He called here?” I said, not believing my ears. “And you told him I couldn’t talk?” I vaguely remembered leaving my mother’s number with his assistant, but I’d assumed he’d tossed it.

  She nodded. “He said he tried your cell phone too, but you must have had it turned off.”

  Harvey had tried to reach me? Harvey had tried to reach me? It had to be important, given the two-hour time difference; he wasn’t usually such an early riser. And he almost never called an employee on a Sunday.

  “You made him sound like a monster, Ann, but he was perfectly polite,” said my mother. “He asked me to have you call him on his cell phone as soon as it’s convenient.”

  As soon as it’s convenient? That didn’t sound like Harvey, who was never on anybody else’s schedule but his own. And why on earth was he calling me in the first place? Was it about Malcolm? Had Tuscany let it slip that I had information about where he was? Not possible. She knew how much Malcolm meant to me. She also knew how much legal trouble I’d be in if I blabbed that he was in a hospital in Middletown. What’s more, she didn’t travel in the same social circles as Harvey and wouldn’t ever have seen him over a weekend. So why had he contacted me from out of the blue? I was completely mystified.

  “Maybe he wants to hire you back,” said Aunt Toni. “You never know.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Maybe he just forgot how much fun it was to yell at me.”

  “Even so, you must be curious about what he wants,” she said.

  More than curious, obviously. I was dying to know, but I was dreading the answer too. For so long, I’d prayed he would call, prayed he would summon me back to the magazine, but things had changed. My priorities had changed. Now my main concern was preventing anything and anyone from coming between Malcolm and me, including Harvey.

  “Are you going to call him now?” asked my grandmother as they all waited with bated breath. In Middletown, a call from the editor of a national magazine was like a meteor falling through the ceiling.

  “Yes,” I said and started for my room so I could use my cell phone.

  My aunt barred the doorway and nodded at the wall phone next to the refrigerator. “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “We didn’t spend the past few hours speculating about this, only to be deprived of the action. Call him from here.”

  With my audience looking on, I dialed Harvey’s cell number, which I’d committed to memory along with his home numbers in Brentwood, Malibu, and Lake Tahoe, as well as the numbers of his various spiritual advisors. He picked up after the first ring.

  “Harvey, it’s Ann Roth,” I said, my voice quivering out of habit. “My mother told me you—”

  “Ann! I love you! I bow down to you! You rule!” he shouted.

  I feared for any possessions he had nearby, but I also wondered why he was praising me. “What’s all this about?” I asked. Could the explanation be as simple as his realizing that I wasn’t such a loser and that he’d been hasty in letting me go?

  “What’s it about?” he repeated with a laugh. “Like you don’t know. Like you aren’t the hottest entertainment journalist in town. Like you aren’t getting your butt on a plane and coming back to work here—with a promotion and a raise.”

  I was stunned, speechless, nonplussed. The words matched the ones he’d spoken in my fantasy. The problem was that I was no longer invested in the fantasy. What’s more, the fantasy involved my sending him the story about Malcolm, and I hadn’t sent it. Why was he going on as if I had sent it? “I still don’t understand,” I said as my hands started to tremble.

  He laughed again. “When I think of how I kicked you out of this place. What a jerk I was, huh?”

  So this was about him admitting he’d made a mistake by firing me? He was just being humble? “Yeah, you were a jerk, but I won’t hold it against you,” I said, trying to inject some levity into the conversation.

  “Listen to you. So feisty. That fresh air in Mississippi must be doing you good.”

  “Missouri,” I corrected him.

  “Whatever,” he said. “The point is, I made a stink about how you didn’t have what it takes to get the big get, that you weren’t a killer, and look how you proved me wrong.”

  Oh God. This was bad, very bad. There was only one big get in Harvey’s mind and it was Malcolm. Something had gone terribly awry, but what? How? Had Tuscany betrayed me after all
? Had she told Harvey I’d met Malcolm in Middletown and written a piece about him? Even though I’d begged her not to?

  “We’re crashing out the issue as we speak,” he went on. “I’ve got everybody in here working their asses off. We were going with Camilla on next week’s cover, but not anymore.” He smacked his lips with glee. “Are we ever gonna blow the competition out of the water, thanks to you.”

  Oh God oh God oh God. I didn’t have to ask whose face was replacing Camilla’s. It had to be Malcolm’s. And now it was clear that Harvey was talking about an actual story, not some gossip Tuscany or anyone else could have passed along to him. But how could the magazine be crashing out what I’d written? The story was still in my computer, unsent. Nobody had read it except me.

  “Harvey,” I said, forcing myself to stay focused. “I need to hear you tell me one more time exactly why you called this morning.”

  “To congratulate you, for Christ’s sake!” he shouted. “To hire you back! To tell you I think the piece is sensational, especially the part about how you had to conduct the interview at an ‘undisclosed location!’ Love that to death!”

  Yes, it was as bad as I feared. Somehow Harvey had my story about Malcolm in his possession—a story I had not sent him. I didn’t know how it could have happened, didn’t think I could survive Malcolm’s reaction to it. How would I explain that I was the writer who’d ambushed him at Spago? The writer who’d been on his tail for an interview? The writer who’d taken advantage of his sickbed delirium to concoct a magazine piece about him? How on earth would I explain that I wasn’t who I pretended to be? I thought I could have made him understand, thought I could have said, “Yes, I tried to be a killer and get my job back, but I didn’t send the story because I only want you.” Not now. Not with the story in Harvey’s hands. Now I didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  “Please don’t run the story,” was all I could think of to say. My entire body was rigid now and extremely cold.