“That’s homophobic.”
“Was it? I’m sorry. I meant it only to sound generally unkind.”
“It’s a serum, not cream, and you’ll be delighted to know I can order it online. Oh, but remember when you used to do nice things for me? That was sweet. You were sweet. Before our marriage turned so toxic.”
“I’m still sweet. Just ask my clients who are currently working.”
Patrick clutched his heart, even though it was clear he took no offense.
“When’s the last time you were even in Los Angeles? Two years? Three? You turn down every invitation I send you.”
“What makes you think I’m not here all the time? Because I don’t call on you or show up at one of your dumb premieres?” Patrick leaned against the window and studied the view over Century City. People power-strolled the outdoor shopping mall across the way, looking like sped-up figures in an old Charlie Chaplin film.
“Well, I can tell this is going to be productive. If you’ll excuse me, I’m supposed to be on a call.” Neal picked up the phone for effect.
“You sent Heidi Himalayas to my house.”
“Who?”
“The girl. Outside your office.” Patrick didn’t care for the casual misogyny, but he knew it was the language Neal spoke.
“Cassie? She came to your house?”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Last week sometime. Or the week before.”
“Is that where she was? I asked her to get me a spoon for my Skyr and she was gone for five hours. I thought she quit.”
“Your Skyr?”
“It’s Icelandic . . . You’re not here to talk about my food, are you? Why don’t we cut to the chase?”
Patrick raised his eyebrows while frowning, which was, with the last of his Botox, surprisingly difficult to do. “Well, okay . . . I’m here to tell you I’m back. I don’t like you, but I need you.” With that out of the way, Patrick took a seat on the leather couch and crossed his legs. He flipped through the covers of the Hollywood Reporter, which were fanned across the glass coffee table, before selecting an issue about Hollywood’s New Leading Ladies, none of whom he recognized. “Do you have any Fanta?”
“By all means, make yourself at home.” Neal leaned back in his Herman Miller Aeron chair and put his hands behind his back. Behind him were more windows and a credenza with a SAG Award.
“Who gave you their SAG Award?”
Neal sighed. “Stephen.”
“Really.”
“For safekeeping. He’s traveling.”
“Can I have it?”
“No.”
“How’s Bethany?”
“You’re back after how many years and you want to talk about my wife?”
“Sure. We’re friends. How about the kids. They good? You never told me children were so much work.”
Neal was confused. “You have children now?”
“Oh, yes. Two. Age nine and six or something like that. Well, they’re not really my children. They’re more like my wards. But still. So much work. The sunscreen, for one. And they need to eat all the time! I’m always fixing them food.”
“Don’t you eat? Just make more.”
“No, I don’t eat.” Patrick patted his firm abdominals. “Are you crazy? Not since 2002.”
Neal stood up, took two steps away from his desk, and then sat back down again. It was like he felt it wise to have the barrier of his desk between him and a possible menace. “Did you steal these children? Do I need to be concerned? Should I get your lawyer on the phone?”
“No, I didn’t . . . What’s wrong with you? They’re my niece and nephew. They’re staying with me for the summer and are being well looked after.”
“Who’s with them right now?”
“The gay throuple who lives behind my house.”
Neal narrowed his eyes. Perhaps this was some sort of test. “So. You’re ready to get back to work?”
“In short.”
“I thought your moving to Palm Springs marked your retirement from the business.”
“Retirement? Oh, god no. That was the start of my comeback.”
Neal picked up a ballpoint pen and clicked it several times. It was surprisingly loud.
“I can’t live in Palm Springs and work? Paul Newman lived in Connecticut.”
“So now you’re Paul Newman.”
“In this scenario only. Well, also—we both have piercing blue eyes. Should I do a line of condiments?”
“Get out of my office.”
“Salad dressings have been done, but I feel like mayonnaise is poised for a comeback. We could get ahead of the curve on that.” Patrick smiled with all his teeth.
“You’re wasting my time. Just like you did the last time you called in the middle of the night.”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was five in the morning. You used to tell me you were up at five in the morning to talk to New York.”
“Were you in New York?”
“No.”
“Then what were you doing calling me at five in the morning!”
Neal had a point. About ten months after he moved to Palm Springs, Patrick suffered a bout of insomnia. When the sun rose, marking the end of his third sleepless night, he called his agent and said he wanted to go back to work. And then, embarrassed, he never called back to say he was suffering exhaustion-induced hysteria. What he wanted was not to go back to work, but rather to go back to sleep. Neal made some calls, which left him with egg on his face when Patrick claimed to have no memory of their discussion. “Look, if you’re not into this . . .”
“Did I say I wasn’t into this?” Neal clicked the pen a half-dozen more times. “And you’re willing to audition?”
“Why do I have to audition?”
“Because you’ve been away. Because people need to see that you still have it. Because you haven’t played the game.”
“I don’t like playing games.”
“Then what do you like?” Neal stared at Patrick like he was a petulant child.
“I like tacos. I like parties.” Patrick glared to see if his agent would remember the advance he had once made, or if it was all in a drunken stupor.
After a beat, Neal turned red and scoffed. He dropped the pen with a thud. “Okay, well you’re playing games right now.”
The longer Patrick sat on the couch without a Fanta, the angrier he got. The memory of the taco truck, and Neal’s reaction to it, pushed him over the edge. What was he doing here? He’d told John he hated earning money for Neal. There had to be a way to earn money and not have this worm leech off of him; now was not the time to be lazy in his thinking. This wasn’t about going back to work. It was about moving forward to work. “You know what? This was a bad idea. YOU’RE FIRED.”
“Oh, I’m fired? You said you wanted to work. How are you going to do that without an agent?”
“I’m getting a new agent.”
“Where are you going to go? Across the street? Read your agency agreement. You’re not allowed to sign with another agency for six months.” Neal picked up a ball of rubber bands and tossed it triumphantly back and forth in his hands.
“Across the street? No. You’d miss me too much. Across the hall.” Patrick looked at the ceiling to buy himself a beat. Was he certain about this? Yes. Yes he was.
“Across the hall . . .”
“I’m with Annie Alps out there. I’m sure she has my files.”
“Cassie Everest.”
“Thank god you knew who I meant. I’m running out of mountains.” Patrick put his feet up on the coffee table, knowing it would drive his now former agent nuts.
“My assistant.”
“Oh, no. She’s off your desk. She’s an agent now. She has a big ne
w client!”
Neal set the ball down and pressed both of his palms on his desktop like he was bracing himself to stand up. “You don’t get to promote people at your whim. You don’t work here. Who do you think you are?”
“She said you were promoting her if I agreed to come back. I’m back.”
“Back with me!”
“I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”
Neal was approaching wit’s end. “And what if it is?”
They stared at each other in a battle of wills, but the upper hand was Patrick’s—it’s why he had mentioned Neal’s wife. Patrick grinned, pleased with himself. “Then you know what I’ll have to say about it.”
Neal chewed this over before lifting his arms in the air as if Patrick had him at gunpoint. He let out an annoyed growl.
“That’s right. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Neal muttered under his breath; he lowered his arms and made a project of stacking some papers while shuffling some others, waiting for this torture to be over.
“Anyhow, I’ll see if Cassie can get me a Fanta. I don’t know what it is, I’m just craving a pineapple soda!” Patrick stood and patted himself to make sure he had his phone and his keys. “I’ll get out of your hair. I wouldn’t want to mess up those sweet plugs.” Patrick paused in the doorway. A surprising flash of regret overcame him (My goodness, he thought, people are complex and weird), but there was no turning back now. “It was good to see you, Neal. Be sure to transfer my files.” He waved and, without waiting for a reciprocal goodbye, stepped out in the hall.
He locked eyes with Cassie, who sat stunned in her cubicle—certain she was going to catch a cyclone of shit the second Patrick left.
“Well, it’s you and me, kid.”
Cassie untangled the headphones from her hair and placed them on her keyboard as Patrick sat on the edge of her desk. “What do you mean?”
“I’m back, but you’re my agent. Congratulations. You’ve got your first client.”
“That’s . . . not possible.”
“I worked it out with Neal. All systems go.” The phone on Cassie’s desk started ringing and she moved to answer it. Patrick lunged for her headset. “Neal will get it.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’re serious.” The phone stopped ringing.
“Deadly.” Patrick pulled a pen from a pencil cup and put it in his shirt pocket. “Turns out, you’re the one I like.”
She stammered a few times before she was able to form words. “I—I—I don’t know what to say.” A cubicle neighbor of Cassie’s prairie-dogged over the partition dividing them to see if she was hearing this all correctly; Patrick met her gaze with a single eye, and she slowly lowered herself out of view.
“Look, I know it’s technically outside of your job description, but I’m going to need a few things.”
“Sure.” Cassie was still too stunned to object.
“I can’t remember any of my social media passwords. Can you have them reset? Just look for my name with the blue check marks.”
“Of course. Anything.” Cassie scrambled for a notepad. “What else can I do?”
“I’m having a party and I could use your help. I need you to invite all my dearest friends. Even the ones I haven’t met yet.” It was a line from Mame, but as soon as Patrick said it out loud he had a newfound appreciation for the wisdom in it. He pulled his new pen from his breast pocket and handed it to her, cueing her to write this down. “Especially the ones I haven’t met yet. Okay? Use your resources. Shake the fruit tree and see what hits the ground. You’ll be there, of course. And invite Neal. He won’t come, but what the hell. I’m in a mood.” He signaled at her to write. “Maybe it will clear the air.”
Cassie scrambled to get it all down. “A party. Dearest friends. Fruit tree. Invite Neal. Okay.” Patrick could hear the uncertainty in her voice. Hesitation, perhaps, but not dismissal. Even she had to see the benefits of getting to know him better to do her job with any sort of aplomb. Planning a party, spending more time with him, could only help in the long run. “Anything else?”
“Yes.” Patrick ran through the list in his head one more time, the one he’d concocted at the bottom of his pool. There was something else. What was it? “Oh yeah. I was thinking of getting the kids a dog for real. Know where I can get something like that?”
Suddenly Patrick had people again.
TWELVE
They sat at Lulu’s around a circular four-top that straddled the inside (with its air-conditioning) and the patio (with its misters), the temperature both hot and cold depending on which moment you asked, the kids holding enormous dinner menus that covered their faces. Patrick glanced down at Marlene Dietrich, who, like the good dog she’d proven herself to be from the moment he walked her out of the West Los Angeles animal shelter, sat at the base of his chair, squarely on the patio side.
“There’s too many choices,” Maisie complained.
“The world is your oyster tonight. There’s no need to complain.”
“They have oythters?” Grant asked skeptically.
“Look, you asked to come here.” Patrick would have preferred any number of other establishments—Copley’s, for instance, on Cary Grant’s old estate—but Lulu’s large, colorful street presence caught the children’s eyes. “Just look at the kids’ menu. There’s like three things. The same three things that are on every kids’ menu in every restaurant everywhere in the world. Even I know this, and my experience is limited.”
“I don’t want to order off the kids’ menu,” Maisie protested.
“Why not?”
“I’m not a kid!”
Patrick set his own menu down and gripped the table for patience. “Don’t be in such a hurry to be older. You’re going to spend the rest of your life wishing you were younger.”
Maisie glared at him before relenting and picking up the separate menu for kids.
Lulu’s reminded Patrick of a cafeteria in a futuristic spaceship, as if people should be lined up at steam tables and carving stations dressed in utilitarian jumpsuits with neat lapels in primary colors after putting in a hard day’s work fixing warp drives and flux capacitors. Or rather, it looked like what someone in the late 1960s thought the cafeteria in a futuristic spaceship would look like, based perhaps on spending too much time watching Star Trek episodes in their stateroom aboard a gay cruise. But it was one of the few places that he knew of that had both a kids’ menu and a bar that served a decent martini (“Dry, very dry, just wave the vermouth over the vodka and it’s probably still too much vermouth”), which ultimately made it a judicious choice for tonight’s lupper.
“Can Marlene be in here?” Maisie asked, always concerned with the rules.
“Why not? She’s a service dog.”
“No she’s not.”
“I’m blind.” Patrick retrieved the sunglasses that were tucked into the neck of his T-shirt and put them on for effect.
“No you’re not.”
“Fine. She’s an emotional support dog.”
“For who?”
“For you. For me, if you don’t decide on your dinner.”
“Why are there olives in your water?”
Patrick was putting out fires left and right. He took a long, slow sip of his martini. “It’s not water.”
“Can I watch YouTube?” Grant set his menu down, bored.
“No.”
“You hate YouTube.”
“I don’t know YouTube well enough to hate it.” But Patrick was certain if he did, that would probably be true.
“Then why not?”
“Because we’re having a family meal. And yes, I realize I sound like my father. This is what you’ve reduced me to in a matter of weeks.” Patrick tore off a piece of bread from the basket on the table before remembering he was thr
owing a party in a week for people he hadn’t seen in ages and he didn’t want to appear bloated. Panicked, he dropped the bread on Maisie’s plate. “Here. This is for you.”
Maisie picked up her knife and reached for the butter.
“I got you guys a dog, you can’t possibly be bored. Should I take her back?” Marlene sat up as if she understood the threat; to placate her, Patrick dropped another bite of bread at her feet. At the shelter, her scruffy face looked haunted, frozen just so in perfect black and white (black around the eyes with a white snoot and perfect black nose). Patrick lied and told the kids she came with the name Marlene. The shelter was calling her something common like Bella or Sophie; he’d already forgotten. On the drive back from Los Angeles with the sun setting behind them, Marlene, who uttered not one bark, proved to be a true silent star who always found her light.
“No! Don’t take her back!” Grant protested.
“Okay, then.” Patrick leaned down and scratched the dog on top of her head. “Look, it’s not YouTube I have a problem with. It’s social media as a whole. And, yes, I know. YouTube is more than social media, but what you watch on there—kid vlogs and whatnot—is. I don’t expect you to understand this at your age, but I’m older and I see what it’s doing to society, and I don’t want to see you fall into the same trap.”
“What trap?” Grant started swinging his legs and Marlene jumped back just in time not to get hit. She resettled on calmer turf under Patrick’s chair.
“You know. We’re hyper-connected, but at the same time desperately lonely. We’re overstimulated by bright lights in our face all the time and the promise of more and more content, more and more people to follow, but we’re also numb, scrolling and scrolling past images we don’t even take the time to recognize, or form a cognizant thought about what they’re saying. About us, the creator—not God, mind you—the content creator, about life.”
“But we’re not society. We’re just Maisie and Grant.” Maisie gave up on trying to butter her bread and dropped her knife with a clang. Patrick took the bread plate from her to help.
“Do you even care about the kids you watch?”
The Guncle Page 12