“Can I … can I buy you a coffee or something?” she asked. Then she laughed again, the same mirthless yelp. “That I’m pretty sure I can afford, and there’s a cute little place a couple doors over.”
“How ‘bout I get the coffee today, and next time, you get it?” Chris suggested.
She nodded. “Thank you. I’d love that. No point trying to stand on false pride now, I guess.”
The coffee shop was more of a bakery, with a very small selection of coffees, all of them predictably overpriced. Tiny, seeing that Chris had picked up company in the wine store, went to pull up the car just outside, so he could see where Chris was, but still give him and his companion some privacy.
Elaine had watched them negotiate that, and when she and Chris were seated with coffees on the table between them, brought it up.
“Do you need a bodyguard?” she asked. “I mean, like, are people ever aggressive with you?”
“Used to be. When I was a young, big-mouth and pissed a lot of people off. Usually not people in the public. Mostly other people in the industry.”
“Oh yeah. I remember those days. When music was all about who was beefin’ with whom.”
Chris grinned. “Exactly. Then we lost a couple of our brightest stars and folks started to wise up. Most of us anyway.”
“And now?” Elaine sipped her coffee. “Now what’s it about? Walking around with a … formidable gentleman like that on your tail?”
“Preserving personal space more than anything else. And when I’m with my wife and kids, about keeping them safe.”
“Does your wife have someone with her all the time, too?”
“No. Not all the time. I’m more of a target than she is. But … sometimes, depending on where she’s going, I make sure she has a little someone extra, just in case.”
Elaine smiled and leaned in conspiratorially. “You mean without her knowledge?”
Chris shrugged, but said nothing.
“I think that’s romantic.”
“She would think that’s crazy,” Chris said. “Not that I’m admitting that something like that even happens.”
Elaine smiled wider, and leaned back, her eyes faraway. “I can’t remember the last time I had a partner who gave a crap about me. Isn’t that sad? Even in the last years of my marriage I had a partner, but not one who truly gave a crap about me. I could have gone missing and I think it would have taken him three days to notice I was gone.”
“People grow apart, I guess,” Chris said, because it was the kind of thing people were supposed to say.
“I don’t know that we grew apart because I’m not sure we were ever together. Listen to me. Blathering on about my ex. I’m such a cliché. If you were a date, you’d never call me again.”
“But since I’m not a date, you can talk about whatever you want,” Chris pointed out.
“I don’t want you to think I’m some broke suburban basket case pining about her ex, that’s all.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Well, I am broke. That much is true. But I’m not pining about David. I even forgive him, I guess. I just don’t forgive myself. For having been with him.”
“If you want to talk about him, I’ll listen.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?” Elaine let her head fall to one side, her expression quizzical. “Part of me can tell that you’re not that interested. And then the other part tells me that you’re … I don’t know just the kind of man who prefers to listen instead of talk. And that though you don’t believe it of yourself, you’re a very patient, understanding person.”
“You’re right. That’s not how I’d describe myself at all.”
“How would you describe yourself?”
“Nah,” he said. “We were talking about you. You and David.”
“And you’re not easily distracted, either,” Elaine laughed. “Okay. Me and David. Here’s the story …”
They met at a brokerage firm where David was the hotshot, and she was the prettiest admin assistant. She said that part without vanity or self-consciousness: I was the prettiest girl there. Chris liked that, the way she stated something as fact that most people would have been reluctant to acknowledge, even if it was something they knew to be true.
She wasn’t just the prettiest girl there, she was the most outgoing, and vivacious. All the men flirted with her and asked her out. She turned all of them down but didn’t mind going to office happy hours when everyone was in a large group. David pursued her. Her pursued and won her and she was his girlfriend for two years when he proposed.
“He wanted me to stop working right away,” Elaine said. “Even before the wedding. I was smart enough to resist that, thank God. But once we were married, he insisted and so I did as he asked. I thought it was because he wanted to take care of me. Later, I realized it was because he thought it reflected badly on him, to have his wife working as an admin assistant at the place where he was planning on making his first million.”
And then she got pregnant. David kept making money and working longer hours. And since he was giving her all the material things she ever thought she wanted, she told herself her marriage was fine.
Until he told her he was unhappy and wanted a divorce. He had been having an affair with one of the female brokers and wanted to start again with her.
“He told me I’d gotten boring,” Elaine said. “That there was no substance to me. And that I wasn’t even fun anymore.” She shrugged. “It got dirty, I tried to strip him of everything he owned, but really I was just hurt. We finally settled, and I got the house, and chunk of cash, most of which I sunk into my yoga studio down the way here. Stupid.
“I was into yoga at the time, getting over the divorce and all, doing meditation, the whole nine. So, I thought it was the key to the universe or something. But it was a mistake to open the business. Like a woman who likes to shop deciding that it means she should open a clothing boutique. Dumb. Now I’m so sick of yoga, it’s all I can do to stop myself rolling my eyes whenever I have to say ‘namaste’.”
Chris laughed, and Elaine laughed with him. Their eyes met across the table and he had a feeling they were a lot more similar than he would have thought. Like him, she was looking for meaning after a huge life transition.
Elaine hadn’t found it in yoga, and as for him, he didn’t even know where to look.
7
Cristian was handsome, there was no doubt about that. But he was small. Small and well-muscled, but still, only about five-foot-seven. When he smiled, his teeth were impossibly white. And he smiled a lot. While his attorney dickered and nitpicked over every element of the contract, he smiled. Robyn was beginning to think he might be dimwitted when he stood and said he was tired and wanted to take a break.
“You don’t have to be here, Cristian,” his attorney, a woman who looked like she was a month out of law school. “We can touch base with you later to go over …”
“No, I need to be here for everything,” Cristian insisted. “But I need a break. How about we pick up again at about four this afternoon?”
Inside, Robyn was screaming at the top of her lungs: No! My flight leaves at six! I have to be out of here by four!
“Sounds good,” Jamal said. “Let’s pick up at four.”
He stood and shook Cristian’s hand and with the other hand, grasped the young man’s shoulder.
“You drive a hard bargain, kid,” he said. “You’re going to go far in this business. Maybe not with us, but you’re going to go far.”
Cristian smiled at the first part of the compliment, but at the ‘maybe not with us’ part, that smile faltered a little, and Robyn could see the flicker of uncertainty take hold. After a morning during which he had been puffed up with the realization that SE had sent their A Team to reel him back in, now he was beginning to wonder whether he had gone a little too far and lost the only live offer he had one the table.
Robyn and Jamal had learned through their contacts that the Disney thing was little more
than a rumor, but that no overtures had been made. It now seemed likely that Cristian had heard the same rumors and that had been behind his sudden decision to play hardball on his renegotiation.
As they left the nondescript office building where Cristian’s lawyer’s office was housed, Jamal’s gait was bouncy and confident.
“We’ll have him sealed up tight even before four o’clock,” he said.
Robyn wasn’t so sure, but she was eager to cling to the possibility.
“So maybe I’ll make it on my six o’clock flight after all.”
“Maybe. But maybe not,” Jamal said. “I don’t know why you cut it so close.”
“Close? Jamal we’ve been in there since this morning. We barely had time for early check-in and a shower at the hotel before we had to rush down here. I had no idea a basic contract negotiation with a second-tier artist would even be worth the trip, and now we might be here another day.”
Jamal paused and looked at her strangely and Robyn wondered whether she might be sounding a little hysterical. If she was, she chalked it up to being exhausted.
She had left the office shortly after he told her they needed to be on that ten-p.m. flight, gotten home and then had to reorganize her entire weekend in less than an hour. She prepared her kids for the fact that she would be gone overnight, arranged for Chris to take them to the corn maze on Saturday in case she couldn’t, and then packed and killed herself to get to the airport by eight.
And now that she was here, getting out of here seemed to be a goal-post that kept moving. Jamal was saying the whole thing might be a false alarm, but … maybe it was not.
“This is how it is, Robyn. Performers are temperamental. They like to know they’re wanted. Sometimes the only thing that makes them believe that is when the bigwigs—that would be you and me—show up. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Showing up.”
“For a second-tier …”
“Stop saying that second-tier nonsense,” Jamal cut her off. “You do the contracts. You know how much we make from those so-called second-tier folks? Millions. Even the second-tier ones. You want your husband to stay rich? Then you and me got to do our jobs.”
“I wasn’t saying we shouldn’t do our …”
“Then stop complainin’, Robyn. You think I don’t want to be back home and grabbin’ on my woman’s …”
“Okay, okay, fine. I don’t need the visuals. What’re we going to do while this kid makes up his mind?”
“Go have some lunch and chill out, maybe get a nap, and wait.”
They were eating in the hotel restaurant about an hour later when a call came in that Jamal stepped away from the table to take. Robyn watched him, his expression impassive as he spoke. In front of her, a basket of sweet potato fries was getting cold, and she didn’t care. They were limp and soggy anyway; the way sweet potato fries sometimes were. And the burger was some overly-stylized “craft-burger” that had too many fixings. She felt a little queasy from the very first bite and that only made her crankier. On top of everything else, she couldn’t even have a decent meal?
“Well,” Jamal said when he came back and took his seat. “Another one bites the dust.”
Robyn’s head jerked up. “What?”
“He walked. Some small niche label made him an offer they were sitting on all day. Cristian decided he wants to go with them. He’ll be their marquee artist and they promised to throw a whole bunch of money at developing him. And we can’t offer that.” Jamal bit into his burger and started chewing, no less enthusiastic about his meal than when he left the table to take the call.
Robyn was torn between elation because it meant she could go home, and despondency because they’d lost the artist, and on top of it all, she had been a whiner about the trip. Maybe that’s all Jamal would remember of this jaunt now—how poor a team player she had been. If they had pulled Cristian back from the brink, what he would have remembered would have been the win.
“Cheer up, kid,” Jamal said, reading her face. “Win some, lose some.”
The line snaked around in at least three loops that Robyn could count, and at the front of it, agents were performing the same routine with everyone who stepped up to the desk. First, they frantically typed something into their computer, then they looked up with an almost sad smile, and shook their head. The customer would lean against the counter, imploringly, probably trying out other options. Some of them waved their boarding pass, but they all walked away dejected, or a few, angry.
Finally, there was an announcement, that “due to a slow-moving weather system … blah, blah, blah.”
Robyn’s shoulders sagged. The core of the message was that there would be no six o’clock flight, nor was there a guarantee of the others scheduled to depart after that.
Jamal, who had opted to stay until the early morning departure, was probably comfortable in his hotel room, eating a steak, drinking a Corona and watching a game on television. And she was in disgusting LAX, dragging her roll-aboard and trying to will the bad weather away.
Stepping away from the line, she made a call to the hotel to see whether she could get another room—which thank goodness she could, and then another to the airline to get a seat on the early flight.
“Just two more left,” the customer service agent said, “You’re lucky.”
Not so lucky since all the business-class seats were booked and she would be seated near the tail of the plane. The last call she made was to Chris.
“So, you’re stuck,” he said after she gave him the long version of her day, starting with walking sleepy-eyed into the crappy conference room and being greeted by Cristian and his low-rent lawyer.
The three-word response was far short of the sympathy Robyn had hoped for and expected.
“Yes. And even though I’m on the earliest flight, I won’t get home before four probably. So, I guess you’re on corn maze duty after all.”
She heard his sigh.
“Okay.”
“Chris, I’m sorry. This isn’t something I could have …”
“That’s the gig,” he said. “You know how many times Frank had to cancel or postpone family events to go on trips with me?”
“A lot?”
“Yup. Remember that first trip to Paris?”
“Of course.” Robyn found and took a nearby seat. Around her, people were rushing back and forth. Nowhere more than in an airport did the phrase ‘rat-race’ make sense. “That first trip to Paris was when I knew I was in love with you.”
“It was also Frank’s thirty-fifth anniversary.”
Robyn said nothing. She remembered how irritable Frank had been for the entire trip. How reluctant to go he had been in the first place. She was sure at the time that it was just because he was a curmudgeon. Not once had he mentioned the milestone he and his wife wanted to celebrate.
“And you sent him to Paris anyway?” she asked finally.
“Yes, because it was his job to be there.”
She recalled what Jamal said to her about her complaining.
“I’m going to head back to the hotel,” she said sighing. “I’ll call you when I leave tomorrow so you’ll know I’m still on my way. You’re good on the corn maze thing?”
“Yup.”
“When you’re there, don’t take your eyes off any of the children, Chris. Those places can get so hectic and crowded. Especially Jas. You know how she gets her head in the clouds sometimes. And Kaden’s going to want to carry Landyn, but he doesn’t understand how heavy he is, so …”
“Robyn,” Chris stopped her. “I know my kids. Just get to the hotel safe. Text me when you get there, and call me in the morning before you leave, okay?”
She exhaled. “Okay. G’night. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Even his ‘love you’ sounded taciturn, like he resented saying it. Maybe even resented feeling it. Most of all though, Robyn knew he just resented that she was in L.A. in the first place. But there was nothing to be done about that.
The hotel room she checked into looked just like the one she had vacated a mere two and a half hours earlier. Robyn slung her luggage up onto the second bed, opening it and changing right away into the pajamas that she hadn’t even had a chance to wear since she had arrived just that day, at least by West Coast time. Brushing her teeth, she got comfortable, and realizing she was about to drift off, called Jamal to let him know she would be riding to the airport with him at four a.m. the next morning.
“Bad weather,” she told him when he asked what happened. “They canceled a bunch of flights.”
“Damn. Sorry, kid. This whole trip turned out to be a bust, huh? Let’s hope we get out of here on schedule in the morning.”
“Please, don’t even put that out there in the universe. I need to get home.”
“I’m sure we will. Get some rest. You’ll feel much better in the morning I promise.”
There was something a little wrong about her boss having to comfort her because she’d had a fruitless business trip, but she was too tired to dwell on that. So, Robyn accepted the comfort—especially since she had received none from Chris—told Jamal she was getting some sleep and reminded him to not leave her in the morning.
Robyn was up at three a.m.
Not the groggy kind of awake that would make it easy for a person to drift back to sleep if they just lie in the dark and remain still. More like the committed kind of wakefulness. She sat up, re-packed what she had taken out of her bag, showered, got dressed and sat on the edge of the bed waiting for Jamal to call.
The airport shuttle took them through the quiet, grey morning to the airport where they checked in and boarded without incident. Jamal traded seats with her so that she had his in business-class and he took the crappy one back in economy. She was too grateful to argue. Robyn fell asleep again shortly after takeoff, not out of tiredness, but out of relief that she was finally on her way home. She didn’t open her eyes again until they landed.
Rick was waiting for her at the airport and never had she been so glad as she was then to see their taciturn driver and hear his, good afternoon Mrs. Scaife.
Four: Stories of Marriage Page 43