Hearts Unleashed

by Julia Dumont

  “Lolita!” called Cynthia, walking in the door and getting in line at the coffee bar with Paloma, her new assistant. Paloma had grown up in inner city Los Angeles and then thrived at U.C.L.A. She was all brains, beauty, attitude, humor, talent…you name it.

  Lolita rose to meet Cynthia and they hugged. “I thought you were meeting someone at the airport this morning,” said Cynthia.

  “Yeah, well, who needs him?” replied her friend. “I picked up this dashing bloke instead. Meet Seamus. He’s a writer. He’s come to conquer Hollywood. And this is Cynthia. And Paloma.”

  They shook hands all around. Seamus gave everyone his card, something he’d had done-up years earlier when he’d made a push in his writing career…a push that went nowhere.

  “All the information on there is horribly defunct,” he said. “Except for my name, my email address, and the fact that I’m a writer, if not by trade as yet, certainly by passion. Or delusion. Or both.”

  Cynthia tucked the card away and made a mental note: A gorgeous, passionate writer from across the pond. A candidate for Project Radcliffe?

  Seamus shook Paloma’s hand quite a bit longer than he had Cynthia’s. In fact, after they finished shaking they were still holding hands.

  “Well,” Paloma said to Seamus, “I’m an actress, so my entire life is dependent on fantasy. Maybe we can conquer Hollywood together.”

  “I have no doubt,” he replied.

  Lolita was suddenly quite sure that she had been wrong about Seamus’ sexuality. She was instantly hurt that he had taken so quickly to the younger woman.

  Sure, Paloma is beautiful, smart, and fifteen years younger. Maybe twenty. Who’s counting?” I mean besides me? Probably him. But she doesn’t have what I have. Whatever that is. I’ll have to get back to me on that.

  “Okay, Paloma,” said Cynthia, hoping for a variety of reasons that what she was witnessing was not love at first sight, “we’d better get going. We have a lot of hearts to conquer today.”

  “Right, yes,” she said, “but, Seamus, do come see me in this crazy musical I have the lead in.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Johnny Cash,” said Seamus, “don’t tell me you sing too.”

  “She’s an amazing singer,” said Cynthia.

  I can’t sing thought Lolita.

  “We’re still work-shopping the play,” shrugged Paloma. “It opens Friday after next. But you could come to the dress rehearsal this week. Or should I say undress rehearsal. It’s sort of in the vein of Hair or Oh, Calcutta…lots of nudity. It’s a musical comedy about the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley.” She straightened into a comically old-fashioned theatrical pose as if preparing to project out into a large theater, and sang:

  Go down in the valley,

  The valley so low,

  When they say ‘Action!’

  It’s your turn to blow.

  “Lyrics by Sondheim,” she said.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Anyway,” she said, “they haven’t even decided on a title for the show yet. It’ll either be Going Down in the Valley, Porn Free, or Funny Money Shot. What do you think?”

  “I think I’m in love,” said you know who.

  Paloma was blushing noticeably as she and Cynthia departed.

  Chapter 10

  TUESDAY, MID-PM

  Two hours later and a half a block away, Cynthia sat at her new desk in her new office in the new headquarters of Second Acts Dating Services. She swung open the windows and breathed in the gorgeous world that lay before her. Such a view…not even a hint of the venal, cut throat underbelly of Hollywood. The downside was so well masked by the upside…the weather, the exotic greenery, and the sweet smell of orange blossom and success. Los Angeles was like that. Sometimes and in some corners it felt like Heaven on Earth and other times it unexpectedly veered off into what Simpsons creator Matt Groening called Life in Hell.

  She knew that saying yes to Ava Dodd Radcliffe would make an already heavy workload that much crazier. Paloma, who had only started a few weeks before, would need to really step up. Cynthia would have to give her a lot more responsibility or they’d be in trouble.

  “Paloma, could you please come in here?”

  She appeared around the corner in an instant.

  “What’s up, Boss?”

  Paloma really was on it. Even though she was incredibly ambitious about her acting, she took her work at Second Acts very seriously too. She was smart, focused, and a wiz on the computer.

  “Usually I’d tell an employee to please call me ‘Cynthia’,” said Cynthia. “But I kinda like it when you call me ‘Boss’.”

  “Okay, Boss,” laughed Paloma. “How do you feel about ‘Boss Lady’?”

  “Now you’ve gone too far. And by the way, I will call you ‘Paloma’, unless things get serious. Then I might call you ‘Miss Rodriquez’?”

  “No problem, Boss.”

  “Okay, so, Miss Rodriguez…about this Seamus fellow.”

  “The Irish bloke.”

  “Right,” said Cynthia. “Well, I was thinking of asking him if he’d be interested in Operation Radcliffe. He’s sort of the right type…cultured, handsome, charming. But I won’t if you object.”

  “Object?” asked Paloma. “Why? I barely know the boy.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Cynthia. “Because I really don’t want to screw anything up for you.”

  “Oh, no, I’m sure,” said Paloma. “I’m not really looking for romance at the moment anyway.” She did kind of like Seamus, but she already had a couple of hound dogs sniffing around her door and she was looking to simplify her life, not complicate it. Plus, she knew that Cynthia was a bit worried about the whole Radcliffe thing and wanted to be a team player for her.

  “Okay, great then,” replied Cynthia turning to her computer, clicking a few keys, and bringing up the roster for this week’s dates. “Done. Let’s get down to work. I need to get going on a proposal for Ms. Radcliffe. Providing her with “dates” would make a serious dent in the stable. I need to think about how to handle that. But meanwhile, you start arranging the regular dates for this weekend. As you know from watching me do this, every person’s file is annotated with interests, favorite foods, musical tastes, hobbies, educational background…stuff like that. I’ve also added bullet points from their own interviews…highlights of their past romantic lives…things that went wrong, or right, or worst of all, signs of indifference. Disinterest or plain old boredom is much worse than downright dislike. Look at it this way: polar opposites repel, but if one of them flips, you’ve got serious attraction. On the other hand, two batteries that are dead to each other are just that, dead. You take a pass at it______I’ve done a lot of the upfront work and made recommendations for each______and then I’ll review and tweak.”

  Paloma smiled. “I love you, Boss.”

  “Get to work, Miss Rodriguez. I need to get on the phone. Oh, I almost forgot. Would you be available to come along on this crazy adventure? I’ll pay you double your hourly rate for the whole weekend. Not to participate, of course…just to assist me. We need to be there and also be available by phone for any of the normal clients on Saturday night. Most of them are scheduled for Friday, but there are a few. Anyway, the Radcliffe thing should be fun. I think.”

  “Oh, sure” said Paloma. “But the only thing is, my play opens the following Friday and we have a run-through this weekend, on Saturday morning, I have to check for the exact time. When and where?”

  “Not sure where yet. Mid-afternoon probably. I think you’ll have plenty of time.”

  “It’s a deal, Boss.”

  Chapter 11

  Pete Blatt looked down from his balcony on the bustling afternoon Singapore traffic. The sea of humanity was making him seasick. He was tired of traveling. He and the band had played twenty-two major shows in fourteen countries in the past thirty days. And the tour had barely started.

  He had gone out and bought a new phone and an iPad to enhance his video “chats” wit
h Cynthia, but scheduling them had become more and more challenging. The time zone thing was hard to figure out anyway, and since Cynthia was busier than ever, when she did get a break, Pete was either asleep or on stage.

  On top of that, being on a high-profile American rock tour is fraught with temptation. Women had been throwing themselves at him all day and night and his resolve was breaking down. Hotel pools and beaches were chock-full of bikini-clad maidens, usually more than three bed sheets to the wind. In some of the countries they’d been in, if you schedule a massage for lower back pain, chronic for Pete, the girl at your door assumes you want a happy ending. She’s insulted if you turn her down. He fell asleep on the table once and woke up mid-orgasm, way beyond the point of even considering willpower. The other band members either had their wives and girlfriends with them or they were single and out for a wild time every night. There were only so many nights in a row of aborted video-chat sex that a red-blooded guitarist could take. After all, why did he pick up the guitar in the first place? Because piccolo players don’t get laid, that’s why.

  Plus he wasn’t taking care of himself. You know things are bad when the only vegetables you’re consuming are one bite of the celery in your Bloody Mary at breakfast and the mint in your mojito at dinner. He had meant to run every morning and swim laps every night, but that had lasted exactly one day and no nights. His regimen had devolved into shuffling to the poolside bar and floating for hours on an inflatable raft like a sunbaked seal flopped on a rock.

  This particular afternoon, he stumbled to the pool, but even passing out onto a floatation device seemed far too ambitious. He collapsed onto a chaise instead_____the new phone, clutched in his hand like a lifeline to home.

  And it rang as soon as he dropped off, waking him…halfway waking him anyway. He peeled his face from the cushion and pried open one eye to peer into the screen. It was like he was searching a crystal ball for new hope from the future.

  Cynthia Amas has requested a FaceTime session. Accept? Decline?

  “Oh, accept, obviously,” he said out loud, touching the screen, conjuring Cynthia’s eager face a moment later.

  Simultaneously, the young Thai woman on the chaise next to him_____a possibly legal girl who had tracked him to the hotel after the concert the night before_____thought he was talking to her. And since she had just asked him if he’d like her to apply sunblock to his back_____a question he hadn’t even heard, since he was sound asleep at the time_____she squirted a large dollop of the white substance into her hand.

  So, the image that materialized for Cynthia was this: a very young, very beautiful Thai woman rising from just beyond the sunburned, sweaty horizon of Pete’s naked torso with a white viscous substance of questionable origin dripping from her slender fingers. To top it off, the girl was wearing a t-shirt proclaiming, “Guitar Players Make Me Hit the High Notes.”

  “Hi, baby,” said Pete, in a voice like Tom Waits with laryngitis. “What’s happening?”

  At first, Cynthia was too stunned to answer, but when the Thai girl started rubbing the white substance into Pete’s back, she was inspired to speak.

  “This is what’s happening,” she said with cold finality. Pete’s screen flickered, then went black.

  He was in shock, or as much in shock as one can be while in a total state of exhaustion. He shook his head, trying to figure out what he’d said wrong, before drifting off to sleep again.

  He woke up a few hours later and tried to call Cynthia back, but she didn’t pick up. He too was struggling with the time zone issue. He thought he was fourteen hours ahead this particular day, but achieving certitude on the subject was challenging, especially since the time zone kept changing from city to city. At any rate, he didn’t fully comprehend that it was two in the morning for Cynthia. She had turned off her phone an hour before and cried a little before falling asleep.

  Chapter 12

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  After watching about half of a very unfunny comedy, Max had fallen asleep and remained out for most of his transatlantic flight. His stopover at Kennedy was uneventful and then he slept even more of the five hours to Los Angeles. The only place he indulged in over-sleeping was on planes. Unless he happened to be seated next to a pretty woman…then he instantly turned on the full-press charm offensive.

  For Lolita it was a replay of the other morning: god damn alarm clock that she only used on such horrible occasions, oversized travel mug of black coffee, and the mind-numbing half-asleep trek in stop-and-go (mostly stop) traffic from Beverly Hills. Except today she’d brought along her dog Max, the Irish wolfhound. This way if the human Max weren’t on the plane, at least she’d return with one Max from the Emerald Isle. But having one of her favorite canines along for company was the only thing good about it. Mornings like this were the exact reason she had nearly fled L.A., before solving the problem by starting her own business in a location that was within walking distance of her house. But she still resented going to the airport even if it was a once-in-a-blue-moon thing. It irritated her more than it should because, even though she knew intellectually that it was only temporary, she was an impatient woman. When she got stuck in traffic it literally felt to her that she would never get out of it, that she would be trapped forever, another miserable victim of Los Angeles…a small cog in the grand urban mechanism that ensures the miserable fate of those who live and die in L.A. in their stupid cars. If Max didn’t show up this time she thought she just might lose her mind.

  But this morning the flight came in early and Max was waiting for her, coincidentally sitting in the very same plastic chair that she had nearly slid out of and onto her legendary bottom twenty-five hours earlier.

  He leaped up and ran to her. “My God, Lolita, my world is complete again. I’ve missed you more than gloomy skies miss sunshine.”

  As corny and ridiculous as this exclamation was, it still charmed her. They threw their arms around each other and kissed, Max lifting her up and turning her around, her legs floating centrifugally, like a little kid.

  “I feel like a military wife,” said Lolita, “and that you’ve been deployed forever.”

  “I know,” he said. “Well, I’ve been thinking of you every minute of every day I spent on the battlefield of commerce.” He actually had thought of Lolita quite a lot, so it wasn’t as big a lie as it would appear to anyone who knew the details of his sex life over the past weeks.

  “I haven’t looked at another man since you left,” she also lied. She was less of a scoundrel than he was, but that was not saying much. First of all, she’d had a one-night stand with a customer who had come in with his Chocolate Lab just as the shop was closing the night after Max left. She’d turned off the lights, locked the door, and after popping a bottle of champagne from the fridge, they’d made love atop a large pile of fleece and foam doggie beds. A streetlamp and the red exit sign provided the only illumination, and it was even conceivable that she’d had her eyes closed for much of it, but not looking at him at all seemed unlikely. And second, if she’d had complete control over the puppet strings that ruled the actions of those around her, she would have been sleeping late in her bed with the younger O’Brien right now.

  She and Max were made for each other in that sense. Both knew the other had no intention of being faithful, but they liked pretending they were. They were oddly comforted by each other’s lies. Both somehow felt off the hook for their own.

  As they kissed without the slightest concern for post-flight family reunions and general airport comings and goings all around them, Max, the dog that is, was on his hind legs, his front legs outstretched, with paws planted on Lolita’s shoulders, looking a bit like he was trying to either dance with them or get deeper into the romantic equation.

  “I don’t think I can wait until we get to your place,” said Max. “And traffic has got to be horrific still.”

  “Why, Max Ramsey, I do declare,” cooed Lolita, getting all Scarlet O’Hara-ish, “I believe you are making untoward a
dvances. What exactly are your intentions, kind sir?”

  “My intentions shan’t be uttered out loud in the presence of a southern belle of higher station such as yourself, ma’am. The etiquette here is to delay unsavory description until we are behind the closed doors of a local hotelier and your bloomers are properly ripped from your trembling flesh. In short, where is the freaking horse and buggy?”

  They drove north out of the airport on Route One to Lincoln Avenue, looking for hotels. But the places near the airport, though perfectly acceptable for those on business trips or attending conventions, did not provide the proper ambiance that these two dedicated sensualists were seeking. So they forged on through Westchester, to Santa Monica.

  “I’ve heard Shutters is nice,” said Max, immediately realizing that, of course, Lolita was Cynthia’s good friend. She might well know about Shutters’ role in their relationship.

  “Yeah,” said Lolita, not at all angry or insulted, more like amazed, “I’ve heard it’s a nice place to get a room with a girl, room number 14 perhaps, and keep it for fourteen days, only coming up for air for the occasional cocktail or to walk out a muscle cramp.”

  Max smiled, touching Lolita’s shoulder…then face. “Hmm…I have no idea what you mean by that, darling,” he said with faux dead seriousness. He knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t mad. He also wondered if Cynthia would be jealous. And, if so, whether she’d be more jealous if they went to Shutters or someplace she’d never gone with him. Or not jealous at all. He didn’t know so he just rolled a pair of imaginary dice. “Yes, well, anyway, there’s a crazy rumor going around that Santa Monica has more than one hotel.”

  He lay down on his side on the car seat, placing his head face down in her lap. He spoke in the tone of a GPS system, conveying directions directly into her vagina.