Contract with an Angel

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “OK, what we will do is stall. Tell them we’re very flattered and that we’re keeping all our options open. We’ll say that we’re inclined to think that the market undervalues NE because so much of it is closely held. We’ll also say that we don’t think anyone else can put us into play against our own wishes. That will heighten the excitement and won’t hurt us a bit. Can you tell our PR people to get out something like that first thing Monday, Amy?”

  “Of course, Mr. Neenan.”

  “I’m not available to return calls from anyone, especially not Variety or the Wall Street Journal. Tell my counterparts at Time Warner, WorldCorp, and Disney that their offers should be directed to our lawyers and to Mr. Stein.”

  “Can’t go wrong that way,” Joe McMahon agreed with an audible sigh of relief.

  “Anything else?”

  “There’s nothing of importance in the mail,” Amy Jardine said smugly, “except for a new advertisement from Reverend Wildmon accusing you of being a smut monger.”

  “Grand,” Neenan said with a laugh, “more free publicity.”

  Again silence around the table. Normally Neenan would have demanded that the ad be checked by the lawyers for possible libel charges.

  “Has he mellowed out!” Michael exclaimed. “Some angel must be feeding him his lines.”

  The afterglow from Neenan’s ecstatic experience grew warmer and his sexual longings returned.

  “Anything else?”

  They glanced at one another.

  “We’re having more trouble with Jerry Carter.”

  “So what else is new. Do you think we can put out a contract on him?”

  Vincent smiled; the others ignored his comment.

  “He says he needs two more months to complete the editing on Rebirth,” Joe McMahon reported. “That could run us another ten million in expenses and delay release by a couple of months. You know Jerry.”

  Jerry Carter was a gifted young film director who had already made two TV hits. Rebirth was his first venture into feature films and a new experiment for NE. It was a gritty story of an ex-con’s attempt to begin his life again. He was successful of course, but only just barely, and the film ended on a note of at best hope but no certainty. It also ended on a note of very convincing torrid middle-aged sex between the convict and his former wife. “Reverend Wildmon will like everything but the end,” Neenan had told Carter on the phone, a man still to be treated with charm.

  “What do we think?”

  They all hesitated.

  “He’s done good work for us in the past,” McMahon began.

  “Films get out of hand easily,” Stein warned.

  “Anna Maria loved the script,” Vincent said, “and wife or not, we know she’s never wrong.”

  The room became quiet as a group of nuns would have in the presence of sacrilegious blasphemy. Anna Maria was never mentioned at staff meetings, even though she was perhaps the best script reader in America. One simply did not quote the boss’s wife.

  “Not much chance, Vincent, of her not being my wife. Not unless I lose my mind … . What do you think we should do, give him another ten million? Or sell him to WorldCorp?”

  At the mention of Anna Maria’s name the choir appeared from nowhere and began a sprightly round. Though he didn’t think it fit her at all, Neenan felt again an aching hunger for her. He hoped she would be home when he finally got to Lake Forest. He had never insisted on her coordinating her schedule with his. She wasn’t a deep or even an interesting woman, but she was spectacular in bed.

  “I say we give him a month. Tell him at the end of the month we will grab the film out of his grubby paws and ship it, regardless.”

  “OK, let the sin be on your head, Vincent. You fly out there on Tuesday and give him the word.”

  “OK.”

  Neenan glanced around the room. He had never given Vincent an assignment like that before. How did the other members of the staff react to it?

  No one revealed even a flicker of dissent. They must think more of Vincent than his father did.

  “Tell you what, if the lawyer can get out of the courtroom for a day or two, you might take her along. Never hurts to get away from the kid for a bit of breathing space.”

  Vincent’s jaw dropped. “I’m sure she’d love it.”

  “The Beverly Hills Hotel isn’t what it used to be. Try the Four Seasons.”

  “We certainly will … . Maybe you and Anna Maria could join us for supper at our house when we come back?” Vincent sounded pathetically eager.

  “You say that you’d be happy to,” Michael instructed, “and you tell Ms. Jardine to set up the day and the time. Got it?”

  “No, I won’t do it. I don’t want to get involved in a social life with them.”

  “I don’t care whether you want it or not.” Michael removed the contract from his pocket.

  “When do we negotiate the small stuff?”

  “This isn’t small stuff. You got a problem with that?”

  “I don’t believe any of this shit.”

  A melodic cry of protest erupted from the angelic choir.

  “You want to be friends with your son. Are you afraid. to try?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know … leave me alone!”

  The seraph tapped him with the contract again.

  “That’d be a good idea,” Neenan said to his son. “You can report on Carter. Amy, will you set it up with Mrs. Neenan?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Neenan.”

  “Both Mss. Neenans,” the Angel insisted.

  “Both Mss. Neenans.”

  “Naturally, Mr. Neenan.”

  “They think I’m out of my mind,” Neenan said to the seraph as they walked out to his waiting Mercedes limousine. “Even Vincent.”

  “Especially Vincent,” Michael replied. “He’s willing to take a chance on your sanity. The others aren’t. They’ll be a hard sell.”

  “How will I sell anyone else?”

  “Maybe you won’t.”

  “Then what?”

  “The point is that you have to try.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you feel happy at the prospect of your son becoming your colleague and friend?”

  “If I believe you, I won’t have time to enjoy it.”

  “There’s never enough time,” the angel replied. “Here’s your car.”

  “I know it’s my car, damn it!”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Neenan,” Peter said respectfully. “I hope you had a good trip.”

  “It was all right, Peter. Some strange people on the plane.”

  “I guess that can’t be helped in the world the way it is today, sir, can it?”

  Peter opened the car door for Neenan. A distinguished-looking Irish immigrant in his middle forties, he was married to their cook and housekeeper. He sounded and acted like Bertie Wooster’s Jeeves with a touch of the brogue. Neenan always suspected that the similarity was deliberate.

  “Maeve is free today, is she not, Peter?”

  Peter and his wife lived in an apartment above the garage of the Lake Forest home.

  “On Saturday and Sunday, sir.”

  “I won’t be needing the car for the rest of the day. If I need a car tomorrow, I’ll borrow Mrs. Neenan’s Lexus. Why don’t the two of you take off for the rest of the weekend.”

  Neenan had no idea what they would do with a day-and-a-half holiday. Perhaps stay in their apartment. It was none of his business.

  In the front of the car Peter seemed dumbstruck.

  “That is very kind of you, sir,” he said when he had regained his voice.

  Neenan closed the window behind the driver’s seat as he always did. Peter was a great talker, and in the car Neenan wanted peace and privacy.

  “Not bad.” Michael relaxed in the seat next to Neenan. “I didn’t have to tell you to do it.”

  “I knew you would, so I beat you to it.”

  “You’re learni
ng quick … now let’s settle back and talk about your wife.”

  “We’ve already talked about Donna.”

  “I mean Anna Maria.”

  “I won’t discuss her with you.”

  “The hell you won’t,” the seraph said with a genial laugh. “You should excuse the expression.”

  5

  “She’s not much,” Neenan insisted.”Decorative when I need a wife around and great in bed when I need a wife to sleep with. Seems to enjoy sex. But no substance to her. She’s a good script reader because she has the taste and the intelligence of the average American woman. But no depth. Not interesting at all.”

  “Not one of the women you hunt?”

  “Not at all. Completely different person. Completely different relationship. She spends her time shopping, buying expensive clothes and jewelry, hanging around church, reading romance novels, watching television, and taking care of her body. Works out every day.”

  “A body worth pampering, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t deny that. I’m merely saying that she’s shallow.”

  “Which fits your needs in a wife?”

  “Exactly.”

  “We do not normally engage in human vulgarities, Raymond Anthony,” the seraph said with a loud sigh. “We find our own much more vivid, but you wouldn’t understand them. So I’ll have to be content with saying that while you are a monumental asshole, your remarks about Anna Maria mark you as perhaps the greatest all-time asshole of the Western world. You got a problem with that?”

  “You’re telling me I don’t know my own wife?” Neenan fired back, feeling his Irish temper rising.

  “You are, as the young people say, totally clueless on the subject of Anna Maria, and that after all the work we did to get her for you.”

  “Bullshit. I got her myself.”

  “You are wrong.”

  “You haven’t been around my life that long.”

  “Again you are wrong.”

  Hesitantly, warming up for a warm-up, the choir began to hum softly.

  Neenan experienced again the cracking-apart sensation, a tree splitting as lightning strikes it.

  Had these bastards really been meddling in his life all along?

  That was impossible. He had chosen Anna Maria entirely on his own.

  Hadn’t he?

  Donna’s divorce and the subsequent revelation of her liaison with the little bald man was a savage blow to Neenan’s male ego. He was infuriated by the suggestion, which no one dared to make explicit, that he was a sexual failure. Perhaps he could hunt down attractive and interesting women, but he couldn’t keep a wife. Before the divorce, the celibacy required during the hunt was not a great burden. The anticipated prize reduced his daily and weekly sexual impulses. But in the couple of years after the divorce, the delicate balance between celibacy and conquest became unstable. Neenan took some dangerous chances, chances he knew were dangerous.

  It was in this troubled time that Anna Maria Allegro arrived on the scene. He had heard of her Hollywood reputation as an infallible judge of scripts, treatments, and series outlines. Moreover he learned that she was a native Chicagoan. He ordered Joe McMahon to offer her a salary in six figures—a lot for a woman not yet thirty—and the title of vice president to return to Chicago and read scripts for National Entertainment. She accepted promptly and thus saved Neenan tens of thousands of dollars more that he would have been willing to pay.

  Most people in the industry had no notion of what ordinary folks would like. This young woman apparently did. Therefore she was priceless—until she was wrong a couple of times.

  Neenan had been astonished when she came into his office in the Sears Tower. His head pounded with conflicting emotions, all of them desire of one kind or another. Ms. Allegro was petite and slender, a black-haired doll with the face of a pre-Raphaelite Madonna and an exquisite body in a brown suit and sweater that seemed to demand male caresses. Her complexion was flawless, her hair long, her dark, dark brown eyes sparkling, her lips inviting, her every movement rich in sensuality.

  And she could pick winners.

  She had to be an interesting woman by his definition. He set out in hot pursuit.

  He discovered all too quickly that his judgment was wrong. She was not interesting at all, merely a lowermiddle-class girl from the old neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, quite common in her interests. She was good at picking winners only because she was common; she reflected the taste of millions of Americans, especially women, just like herself.

  Moreover she was virtuous. She was perfectly willing to eat dinner with her employer and go to the opera and the Bulls games with him—less enthusiastic about the former and more about the latter—but she was not about to go to bed with him.

  Old-fashioned too, he told himself.

  Yet she was delectable. Moreover she was pleasant, undemanding, witty—and unimpressed by him. Tough, he decided, but sweet. She made him laugh, even when he was not in the mood to laugh, and indeed laugh at himself, which he didn’t normally like to do.

  In a bikini on a beach, she made his head pound and his hands itch. Not an exciting woman save sexually, and that did not mean she would be a good bed partner. He told himself that he ought to stop dating her.

  But he could not—in retrospect perhaps because the seraphs and their crowd would not let him stop.

  Even when he was away from Chicago and engaged in one of his pursuits, he could not get her out of his mind. She had become a permanent actor in his fantasy life, as Donna had been almost a quarter century before. Was he falling in love again?

  Had he not learned once that was a bad idea?

  It wasn’t love as most people would have defined love. Rather it was a combination of highly specific desire for her and an instinctive judgment that she would be a useful and decorative and relaxing life companion.

  It would not do, he told himself, for someone in his position not to have a wife or a permanent mistress. The latter role was out of the question with Anna Maria. Therefore it would seem logical that he marry her. She did not seem surprised at his proposal and readily accepted it. Nor did she seem to mind the toughly worded prenuptial agreements. Rather, she laughed at them.

  She laughed a lot, not a mean or sarcastic laugh but rather the good-humored laugh of someone who thinks life is funny. What more could he want in a wife, especially after Donna?

  Anna Maria laughed a lot in bed too. Despite her relative innocence and inexperience, she was an astonishingly satisfying sexual partner, a blend of modesty and abandon, of hesitation and recklessness, of refreshing lasciviousness and uninhibited passion. Moreover, she was not sexually aggressive—Neenan could not stand women who tried to play the aggressive game in bed. When he wanted sex, she was always ready. When he did not want it, she left him alone.

  Neenan had been genuinely fond of her and still was as a matter of fact. She was such a tasty prize that he thought of abandoning his pursuits of interesting women and settling down to a life of agreeable fidelity.

  Then a woman came along whom he had to possess.

  He did not think that Anna Maria knew of these chases. Such desires were beyond the range of her vision. So he lived, as he thought, in the best possible of both worlds, a compliant wife at home and interesting women away from home. There were costs in such an arrangement, but they did not seem too high. Anna Maria was a handsome consort who lent luster to his presence and was an excellent lover. True, their lives went in opposite directions, she to clothes and jewels and care of her body in their gym and care of her soul in the church, and he to greater power and wealth in National Entertainment and to his temporary handmaids, as he often thought of them.

  She had at least come to enjoy opera. Up to Puccini anyway, even if she did not share his taste for more recent composers. She loved to sit next to him at the Lyric and hold his hand and hum softly along with the soprano.

  Neenan didn’t often feel guilty, but those interludes bothered him a little. The woma
n was too damn trusting.

  It was impossible to make Anna Maria fight. She merely laughed at him when he was irritable. Yet he was never certain what she really thought of him. Behind her bedroom eyes, there might well lurk dangerous ideas. More likely there lurked nothing at all.

  They had produced no children. He would not have objected if she wanted to be a mother. But she apparently was infertile, though they had never discussed the subject. Indeed they had rarely discussed the matter seriously. She did not complain about the demands business made on him. He did not complain about her clothes and her jewels and her romance novels and the time she spent in church.

  On the whole she was therefore the kind of wife he wanted. He had no idea whether he was the kind of husband she wanted. His only fear was that some night she could become a Sicilian witch and stick a stiletto between his ribs.

  Not very likely, he told himself. The prenuptial agreement did not specify a large income for her if he should die. He told himself that he would have to change that as the years went on, but he was in no hurry to do so.

  “You didn’t mention that she’s quite a golfer,” Michael said accusingly.

  “I guess I forgot. She does win the women’s tournament at Lake Forest Country Club almost every year. Good with the short irons and the putter. Plays almost every day during the season.”

  “Better than you are.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I don’t get as much chance to play as I used to.”

  “She used to beat you every time you went out on the course with her. Without a handicap. So you quit playing against her. Your male ego couldn’t take losing to a woman, not to say a diminutive woman, not to say especially the diminutive woman who is your wife.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Come on, R. A., don’t try to kid me. She humiliated you and loved it.”

  “She was a poor winner.”

  “And you a worse loser. Well, you’re going to have to play her tomorrow. She’ll probably beat you and you’ll be a good sport about it. Got a problem with that?”

  “I sure do!”

  “Too bad. You’re going to do it anyway. And you’re going to brag about how good she is when you’re eating dinner at the club.”