Hearts Unleashed

by Julia Dumont

  She had also felt a bit nervous that Second Acts was verging on becoming an escort service. She always thought there was a fine line that came with the territory, and this enterprise might test the limits. But how could she say no to Ava? She was basically weeping into her lunch, for god’s sake. And when it came right down to it, Cynthia thought putting this whole thing together for her would be a lot of fun. Maybe too much fun. She did want to check in with an old friend who actually specialized in grief counseling…just to explain the situation and get his opinion.

  She took the envelope out of her purse and opened it slowly. She peeked inside. It looked like one of those over-sized personal checks from massive leather checkbooks you see in movies from the forties, the size of an ancient photo album. The kind that Charles Foster Kane or Lionel Barrymore would use and then slam shut, like they’d just bought and paid for the entire world. The paper was thicker and lusher, like a wedding invitation, and the border decorations were more elaborately scrolled than normal checks.

  She had absolutely no idea what to expect. They hadn’t talked money at all.

  She pulled it out and held it up.

  $250,000.00

  It took her breath away. Her hands trembled a bit. The only times she’d seen a check that big were in a real estate transactions and then the checks just fly across shiny tabletops and quickly vanish into escrow or someone’s bank account other than one’s own.

  Ava’s handwriting wasn’t old fashioned. No old world flourish. It looked like she’d used a thin marker, not a quill or a fountain pen, and the letters and numbers were small and mousy, sort of too tight and precious for the grandiosity of the actual check and its monetary value. It reminded her of the work of shy arty girls from high school…more printing than cursive, controlled, precise, and perhaps revealing a fear of making mistakes or of being too flashy. Almost virginal. Well, that was obviously not the case with Ava Dodd Radcliffe, but she had married incredibly young and, although Cynthia hadn’t delved too deeply into her past, she could totally see the sixteen-year-old Ava as a shy arty girl, quietly, sensitively driving all the crazy arty boys wild…from the introspective pimply ones, to the macho motorcycle-riding sculptors, and everyone in between, including a substantial percentage of the girls.

  She wondered how she had even arrived at the figure. Was that her standard fee when embarking upon a long-term business relationship? Sort of monetary shock and awe. What did the chef get? The gardener? The captain of the Que Sera Sarong? The paperboy? She simultaneously felt lucky and like an underling in a way she hadn’t with any of her other clients. Some of them were quite well off, but obviously nothing like this.

  On the other hand, she did feel respected. A check for a quarter-of-a-million dollars is way better than a sharp stick in the eye. She was pretty sure anyway. Plus, if you stop and think about it, a billionaire writing a check for $250,000 is like spending $25 for a normal human.

  As she pulled out of the parking space, she remembered she had turned off her phone for the meeting. She turned it on and descended the ramp. The phone rang as soon as it was finishing powering up.

  It was her mother. Cynthia hadn’t heard from her in a week and a half. Margie Amas had left Las Vegas, bound for Sicily, with her new fiancé——it still unsettled Cynthia to think of it——the notorious Hollywood hotel concierge and lothario, Dominic Orlando. He had wanted Margie to meet his family in his hometown. They were planning to tie the knot back in L.A. upon their return.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, pulling up to the booth.

  “I’m just calling to say hi,” said her mother, or at least Cynthia was pretty sure that was what she said. The connection was not great.

  “Eleven dollars,” said the parking lot attendant.

  “Hold on a second,” said Cynthia, opening her purse.

  “Hold on?!” screeched her mother. “We just started talking.”

  “No, Mom, wait…” She handed the attendant a fifty-dollar bill.

  “I can’t wait. I’m going out to dinner with Dominic and his whole family and at least three of his old girlfriends. I’m going nuts over here!”

  The attendant was counting out the change.

  “That’s sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.” He had obviously mistaken the fifty for a twenty. But he even shortchanged her for a twenty. The first bill he handed her was not a five, it was just another single. So he’d given her five dollars instead of the thirty-nine he owed her.

  “Hey, wait, no, this isn’t right.”

  “I know it isn’t right!” screamed Margie. “Dominic has slept with half the town! Maybe still is! He has been disappearing for hours at a time…”

  “Mom, hold on.” She put the phone on the seat. “Listen, mister. I gave you a fifty. I know I did. I had one fifty in my wallet and now it’s gone. But besides that, even if I had given you a twenty, you still stiffed me. You gave me five ones instead of a five and four ones.”

  “So now you’re saying I owe you five?”

  “No. You would owe me four if I’d given you a twenty. But I didn’t, so you owe me thirty-nine. Well, thirty-four now. I think.” Cynthia had consumed two glasses of wine and the small glass of Cointreau that Ava had brought out with dessert, and although her math was accurate, her skills of explanation were a bit impaired by the lubrication.

  “CINDY! CINDY! DOMINIC WAS YOUR FRIEND! WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME ABOUT HIM!” She could hear her mother as clear as a bell all the way from Sicily, and the phone on the seat was not on speaker.

  “Lady,” snapped the attendant, “can’t you at least choose a lie and stick with it?”

  Cynthia had reached her limit. She held up her index finger, glared at the man, said, “Hold on, sir.” and grabbed the phone.

  “Mom! Are you insane? I mean more than usual? I did warn you about Dominic! Repeatedly! Passionately! I was totally against it! Good God! Well, at least you didn’t marry him yet.”

  Stone-cold silence from Sicily. At first Cynthia thought the call had dropped out, but then she heard her mother breathing.

  “Don’t tell me you got married in Sicily! Mama mia!”

  “I can’t hear you, Cindy. Listen, I’m late for dinner. His mother is waiting for me. She’s ninety-two. Even she warned me about Dominic. Why didn’t you warn me? Whatever, I forgive you; besides, I do love him more than anything in the world. Okay, I gotta go…caio!”

  Cynthia was beside herself. Her father had died when she was young and her mother’s love life had pretty much died along with him. Margie had been alone and lonely ever since. She was desperately seeking someone, anyone, and had obviously been vulnerable to being swept away by the charming, but serially seducing Dominic.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Cynthia, a little too loudly.

  A short blast from a car horn…there were now two cars waiting behind her.

  The parking attendant looked more worried now, like this angry, lying woman had suddenly transformed into a crazy, dangerous one.

  He reached into the register and threw the fifty at Cynthia. The gate opened.

  “Thanks,” she said, counting out the dollars in her hand. “Okay, hold on, I need to give you some money now.”

  “No!” screamed the heavy-set attendant in a little-girl squeak. “Just leave. Leave now.”

  But Cynthia wanted to pay.

  “No. I don’t want special favors. I want to pay what I owe.”

  “Just get out of here!” said the attendant, now flushed with emotion.

  Cynthia threw the money at him and pulled out. About two blocks down Wilshire she realized that she’d thrown back the fifty.

  She didn’t go back. Obviously.

  Her phone rang. Lolita.

  “Okay, Cynthia, spill the beans. Your meeting is over so why didn’t you call me?”

  “How in the world did you even know I was out?”

  “Because you picked up! I’ve left you six messages. Come on: the 411 on Ava Dodd Radcliffe. I want it. I need i
t. I crave it. Give it to me. Now.”

  “Well…” said Cynthia. She proceeded to explain Ava’s proposal. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little concerned about her. She has been through a lot. She wants me to put together social gatherings so she can meet people. The kind of people she doesn’t usually meet. She put me on retainer. But I’m not positive that she’s ready for this kind of thing. I wouldn’t be.”

  “Well, I would,” said Lolita without hesitation. “In fact, count me in.”

  “Oh, Lo, I’m not sure…everybody’s supposed to be strangers to each other…”

  Lolita snapped. “I am a stranger! I don’t know Ava Dodd Radcliffe! You are not going to keep me out of another one of these things!”

  “When have I ever even done anything like this?”

  “The whole Jack Stone thing. You kept me out of that. I’m the whole reason Stone came to you and you kept me out.”

  “But…”

  “And I brought Ava Dodd Radcliffe in too.”

  “You what?”

  “I just found out this morning from Tanya, that she mentioned you to her. Through her dog trainer, that is. But Tanya works for me. And she is spreading the gospel of Second Acts on my direction. In fact I’ve drilled it into her head.” This was true. Lolita had been a huge promoter of Cynthia’s business. She had sent many clients her way.

  “Oh.”

  “So, like I said: count me in.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Cynthia. “You’re on the list.”

  Chapter 8

  TUESDAY EARLY AM

  Lolita took a large gulp of coffee as she pulled up to international terminal six at LAX at 6:12 AM. She had been up since four. She tried to remember the last time she’d gotten up that early and then it came to her: never. She pulled into the airport parking structure.

  She got to the revolving door where the passengers arrive, just down the way from baggage claim. She squinted up at the ancient arrival/departure screen. It was flickering and scrambled and almost completely unreadable. She looked around for an airline employee, but the only worker for as far as the eye could see was pushing a mop.

  Lolita checked her phone for the flight info.

  “Fucking Max,” she said out loud. Of course she knew that it wasn’t his fault that the flight had been delayed an hour and fifteen minutes. She was just pissed that she’d gotten up this early and now had to wait. The blaming Max part was more of joke, really. But what she hadn’t noticed was that Max had texted her in the middle of the night saying that he had postponed his flight yet another day, due to an “unavoidable commitment.” Yeah, right, define unavoidable. Better yet, define commitment. So, even though the hour and a quarter wasn’t his fault, the twenty-four hours were. She would not have appreciated the irony that “Fucking Max” was currently fucking a twenty-nine-year-old Irish lass named Emily in a private dining room in the back of the historic Bleeding Horse Pub on Camden Street in Dublin. They were on the floor, bare naked and barely hidden by the two-hundred-year-old wooden table and chairs, a well worn oriental rug providing enough padding against the ancient stone floor, Guinness passed between tongues, its effects shared inside their heads, as he sang as much as he could remember of “The Wild Colonial Boy” before improvising additional verses intercut with outbursts of ecstasy. What had started as:

  There was a wild colonial boy,

  Jack Duggan was his name.

  He was born and raised in Ireland,

  In a place called Castlemaine.

  Became:

  There was a wild Californian boy,

  Max Ramsey was his name.

  Neither born nor raised in Ireland,

  He’ll fuck you just the same.

  Emily was giggling with pleasure. She had told him when they’d met, leaning against the antique beer-soaked bar that, alas, no man had ever provided her with an orgasm. What she’d actually said with the most adorably forlorn expression you’ve ever seen, in the most charming and innocent brogue you’ve ever heard, was that “no fella has ever tickled my fancy in that special way, don’t you know.” Well, Max, of course, found this particular combination of undefiled beauty yearning to be defiled an unbelievably attractive nuisance. He could not let this challenge go unmet, even though he was already hell-bent on seducing her anyway, and even though he was almost sure she was lying. Later in his hotel room_____under his teasing threat to deny her that which she claimed to never have had_____she confessed that indeed she was. It had become pretty obvious when she screamed extremely specific instructions about little tweaks she’d prefer in his technique. And now here they were again back in the Bleeding Horse a week later later, this time circumstances demanding instant gratification, passions that could not, would not wait until they returned to the hotel, a mere block and a half away.

  Back at LAX, Lolita sat down, slouching low in the hard plastic chair, and promptly fell asleep, her long legs stretched straight out in front of her. Only the rubber heels of her high black boots kept her from sliding onto the floor.

  A little more than an hour later, the passengers on the flight from Dublin, the one that Max would have been on, deboarded. They passed through the revolving doors on the way to baggage claim, looking for loved ones. Seamus O’Brien was also looking around, but mostly scouting for movie stars, when he tripped over the outstretched legs of an American sleeping beauty. She woke up, helped him to his feet and they commenced to chat while she waited for Max.

  “My friend should be coming along soon,” she said. So Seamus waited with her. They hung around until every last passenger was accounted for and then Lolita took out her phone. She was going to call Max, but then finally saw the text.

  “Fucking jerk,” she said and then texted back:

  OK. Maybe I’ll be at LAX next time…maybe not.

  “Man trouble?” asked Seamus with a smile.

  “Is there any other kind?” replied Lolita.

  She helped Seamus pick up Samuel Beckett from cargo. They discovered a common interest in dogs.

  “Oh, God, I love Beagles,” she said, kissing the dog on the lips.

  “You seem to be in love with my dog,” said Seamus.

  “You have no idea,” she smiled. “I like most dogs more than most people. I work with dogs. I was raised by dogs. I am not kidding.” Lolita wasn’t kidding. But she’d long stopped trying to explain to most people that Max the Irish wolfhound, King the Great Dane, and Wilfredo the Chihuahua were no ordinary canines. They had become her furry guardian angels after her father was imprisoned for perpetrating a Ponzi scheme upon his adoring and unsuspecting client base, (predating Bernie Madoff by decades) and her mother was institutionalized after her resulting nervous breakdown. Actually, guardian “angels” may not be completely accurate. Although the triumvirate do protect her and definitely have her best interests at heart, their inexplicable talents_____ranging from miraculous to merely baffling_____are sometimes useful, sometimes aggravating, but always at least partially problematic.

  “Wow,” said Seamus, “you win. I just, you know, have a dog. He’s a good old dog. That’s about it.”

  “Hey,” said Lolita, wondering if she had rhapsodized a tad too much in the canine department, “I’m driving to Beverly Hills. Where are you headed?”

  “To my brother’s in a place called Los Feliz. O’Brien’s. More like a pub than a café, apparently.”

  “Get out,” said Lolita. “You’re Donald’s brother?”

  “All my life. Is that close to Beverly Hills?”

  “Oh, yes,” she lied, “very close.”

  “Small world,” he marveled as they walked briskly toward the parking garage. But the world was even smaller than he knew.

  Chapter 9

  TUESDAY LATE MORNING

  The funnel-shaped lamps over the bar at O’Brien’s Café on Franklin Street were vibrating and swaying. Patrons observed concentric circular waves in their coffee cups, suggesting the approach of Jurassic Park dinosaurs.

  “D
o you feel that?” asked one, looking up from his latte.

  “This is the biggest one I’ve felt since I got here,” said another.

  A tourist dived under a table.

  But this was no earthquake. The epicenter was directly overhead in the O’Brien apartment…more precisely at the intersection of Donald and Adriana, who were slamming each other with an enthusiasm and desperation consistent with a couple expecting a long-term out of town visitor any minute. On top of that, down the street Adriana’s apartment was undergoing renovations.

  “I…expect…we’ll…be…doing…this…on…one…of…my…massage…tables…for…the…next…few…months,” panted Adriana.

  “I…would…do…this…on…a…train…and…I…would…do…this…in…the…rain,” huffed and puffed Donald, “with…profound…apologies…to…Dr….Seuss.”

  Tommy, a recent hire at the café, also believed the rumbling to be a seismic geological event and was genuinely concerned, wondering about his boss’s whereabouts, until he heard a howl in an unmistakable Irish brogue from upstairs, just as Lolita walked in with Seamus and Samuel Beckett.

  Seamus looked up at the ceiling and said in his booming baritone, “It is truly a sound for sore ears that my big brother is having a good time here in these United States.”

  Lolita called her assistant Tanya to let her know that she would have to open the shop today. Then she and Seamus ordered breakfast, and Samuel Beckett curled up at her feet. It took one coffee’s worth of conversation for Lolita to conclude that Seamus was gay. The tip-off was that he was showing no signs of being attracted to her and that almost never happened with Lolita.