Sis Boom Bah

by Jane Heller

  Woody Davenport, the head writer of From This Day Forward, was my boss, responsible for creating the overall “bibles” of the show, the long-term storylines covering up to a year’s worth of plots, characters, cliffhangers, and resolutions.

  “You wanted to find out what’s going to happen with Holden. Is that why you read the breakdown?” I asked.

  “Well, I was curious to see where Woody’s taking the character,” he admitted.

  “He would have a fit if I told him,” I said. “He really does have a cardinal rule about this.”

  It’s a given in the business: Let actors in on the future of their characters and the next thing you know they’re demanding rewrites, calling their agents, whining, and the show becomes a cesspool of battling egos.

  “Then don’t tell him,” said Philip. “It won’t happen again, so why raise his blood pressure?”

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to lose my job, but I didn’t want to lose Philip, either.

  “You know, I’d never seen a breakdown before,” Philip mused. “I had no idea how hard you must work. All those pages and pages you’ve got to come up with every week, the carefully laid-out scenes, the dramatic moments, the continuity from show to show. You’re very good, Deborah. Very talented.”

  “Oh. Well. Do you think so?”

  “I do indeed. I certainly couldn’t write a breakdown. It takes a special kind of skill that I don’t have. You, on the other hand, have it—to the max.”

  I felt my expression soften. “It’s nice to have the positive feedback, Philip. Thanks.”

  Sensing that he had melted my anger, that his flattery had melted it, he walked toward me and took me in his arms. “I meant what I said about poking my nose where it doesn’t belong. It won’t happen again, Deborah. Forgive me.”

  He drew my face close to his and kissed me, more insistently this time. I forgave him. Who wouldn’t?

  We returned to the living room, arm in arm, sipped our drinks, and went to dinner. At the restaurant, Philip was extremely attentive to me—reverential, almost—even while signing autographs. He held my hand, then brought it to his lips and kissed it—palm, fingers, knuckles, you name it. By the time dessert and coffee were served, I had forgotten about the incident in my apartment involving the breakdown.

  Seconds after bringing me home, Philip was all over me, murmuring terms of endearment to me as he nibbled away at my lips. I cut things short, though, reminding him that I had to get up early for Woody’s Monday meeting, an exhausting, day-long event that was held at his extravagantly decorated Park Avenue apartment and was mandatory for breakdown writers.

  “When can I see you again?” Philip asked as we stood by the door. “Next weekend? Friday night? The sooner the better.”

  “Friday night would be wonderful,” I said, flushed with the intensity of his ardor and my own.

  We kissed goodnight and then he left.

  I leaned against the door for several minutes, eyes closed, heart racing, reliving Philip’s every word and gesture. It seemed to me that I had finally managed to snare a good one. I congratulated myself.

  Chapter Two

  Woody Davenport was a legend in the field of daytime television, a larger-than-life figure whose flair for the dramatic was evident in his appearance as well as his work. At six-feet-six inches tall, he literally towered over us, his blue-black toupee combed into a great pompadour that added another two or three inches to his height. He wore flamboyant neckties, drank copious amounts of alcohol, bedded women of all ages. He was a character in an industry of characters, but most significantly he was a survivor; while a parade of executive producers had come and gone during his seventeen years with From This Day Forward, Woody remained. No one could even contemplate the show without him. I certainly couldn’t, and neither could the other four writers who convened in his living room, an enormous high-ceilinged space decorated in a classic Greek motif. (I found his affinity for columns, arches, and moldings amusing since he grew up on a farm in Kansas, not the Parthenon.)

  It was business as usual that particular Monday until we broke for lunch. Helen Mincer, a tart-tongued fifty-something who had joined our writing staff after stints at The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless, and General Hospital, approached me at the buffet table and said she’d heard I was seeing Philip. As Helen is an incredible busybody, I was not surprised that she knew about Philip and me. What surprised me—floored me—was what came next.

  “Stay away from the guy,” she warned. “He hits on writers so he can sneak into their offices to read their breakdowns. He figures if he gets a look at the episodes in advance, he’ll have more control over his storylines and grab more air time.”

  I felt my cheeks flame, remembering the night before, when I had found Philip in my office reading my breakdown.

  “I heard this from three different writers on General Hospital,” she added for good measure. “Your boyfriend pulled his crap on all of them.”

  I was stunned, but I refused to believe Helen. Not right away.

  “If Philip ‘hits on writers,’ as you put it, why hasn’t he hit on Nancy or Kiki or Faith?” I asked, referring to the show’s other three breakdown writers.

  “Because Nancy’s married. Kiki’s Woody’s girl. And Faith’s a lesbian.”

  “Faith’s a lesbian?”

  “Boy. You are out of the loop.”

  Obviously. “What about you, Helen? Why hasn’t Philip gone after you and your breakdowns?”

  “He knows I’m on to him,” she replied. “He wouldn’t dare try his shit with me.”

  “But he’d try it with me, is that it?”

  Helen shrugged. “You’re the one he’s romancing.”

  I was tortured by Helen’s bombshell, couldn’t decide whether to trust her or Philip. But as I sat at my computer the next day, trying in vain to crank out my weekly writing assignment, I knew I had to put myself out of my misery, knew I had to find out if Philip Wiley was a prize or a prick.

  And so I came up with a plan. When he telephoned about our getting together Friday night, I suggested that we have dinner at my place. I was going to write a bogus breakdown in which his character, Holden Halsey, would be killed off the show—an outline that I would leave in a folder on my desk, right where he could see it if he happened to wander into my office while I was busy cooking.

  One way or another, I’ll have my answer, I vowed.

  Not the answer I wanted, unfortunately. I was whisking up a nifty vinaigrette Friday night, while Philip was supposedly in the living room relaxing, when he stormed into the kitchen, waving the counterfeit outline in the air, his pretty-boy face contorted with anger.

  “Woody’s killed me off!” he shouted. “He’s bloody well gone and killed me off! He won’t get away with it, do you hear me? Do you?”

  “The whole building can hear you, Philip.” So he took the bait, I thought, my heart sinking. The guy actually slithered into my office the minute my back was turned and read the breakdown, the slimeball.

  I was disappointed but not devastated, I realized, as Philip ranted and raved about his contract, his agent, his fans. Maybe it was because Helen had prepared me for this outcome. Maybe it was because I’d only had one real date with Philip and hadn’t invested that much time and energy in our relationship. Or maybe it was because my romances regularly ended badly and so what else was new? Still, I didn’t appreciate being had.

  “You haven’t been written out of the show, Philip,” I told him as I poured the vinaigrette down the drain, along with the beef stew I’d prepared. “The breakdown you read was a decoy. I left it on my desk purposely. To see if you were as big a rat as Helen Mincer said you were. If you’d read the real breakdown, the one I handed in this morning, you’d have learned that you’ve got a juicy storyline coming up. Holden is going to be a hero, Philip, and you’re going to be a star.”

  He stared at me. “A star?”

  “A big star.”

 
“A big star.” His eyes widened and the Holden Halsey grin reappeared. Then came the laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha. As if his loathsome behavior toward me had merely been a practical joke. It occurred to me that of all the creeps I’d dated over the years, Philip Wiley was the creepiest.

  I pushed him out the door and locked it.

  I was about to run off into the living room, fling myself onto the sofa, and have a good cry when the phone rang. It was Helen.

  “You were right about Philip, if that’s why you’re calling,” I said.

  “It isn’t,” she said. “Woody’s been fired. The network’s gonna announce it tomorrow.”

  I was dumbstruck. Woody canned? The Woody Davenport? After nearly twenty years at From This Day Forward? How would the show survive without him? How would I survive without him? Why would the network want to get rid of him?

  Helen explained that he was taking the fall because our ratings were down—and because he was fifty-seven.

  “They’re bringing in a team of head writers to replace Woody, all of them in their thirties,” she said. “Their mandate is to attract a younger audience to the show.”

  “Oh, great. We’ll be writing about teenagers now.”

  “If we’re still writing.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “You know what happens when there’s a shakeup. Nobody’s job is safe. I’ve already got a call in to a producer-friend of mine at Another World. If you want, I’ll put in a good word for you, Deborah.”

  I thanked Helen, but at that moment, writing for a soap opera seemed redundant.

  The new head writers were three women who had never watched daytime television, let alone worked in it. One came to our show straight from the editorial department of Harlequin Romances. Another had produced and directed an episode of Baywatch. And the third had written the copy for that series of television commercials in which a man and a woman fall in love after discovering their shared affection for a particular brand of coffee. I mean, what was the network thinking?

  Not that I wasn’t a good soldier. I went to my new bosses’ weekly story meetings, never mentioning Woody unless they mentioned him first, never appearing disdainful of their lack of experience, never even rolling my eyes when one of them (the advertising genius) suggested we conduct focus groups to determine whether the show was resonating with younger viewers. I played the game, handed in my breakdowns, deposited my checks in the bank. I steeled myself to the turmoil that was going on around me, to the politicking, the back-stabbing, the bitching. I did not even flinch when Helen informed me that the ex-Harlequin editor was dating Philip.

  I felt lucky to have a job—a well-paying job at that—but, deep down, I was miserable. I yearned for the old days, when the very idea of working with actors and actresses was a thrill. I had loved my job then, loved seeing my episodes broadcast on millions of TV sets, even loved the pressure of meeting deadlines. It hadn’t mattered a bit that I wasn’t writing for Masterpiece Theatre, that my characters regularly developed amnesia, returned from the dead, and ran off with mysterious monarchs of tiny foreign countries. I’d gotten a kick out of the melodrama that defines soap operas, the zany plot twists, the overheated love scenes. But times had changed. I was no longer the wide-eyed ingenue, seduced by what I perceived to be the glamour of show business. I was tired and jaded and bored. I was a breakdown writer heading for a breakdown.

  Of course, what finally broke me down wasn’t the job or missing Woody or even the aborted fling with Philip. It was the burglary.

  It happened on the first Monday in February, the week I was leaving for Florida for my mother’s birthday party. I’d gone to the head writers’ story meeting and when I’d returned to my apartment at about eight o’clock that night, I inserted my key in the lock only to find that the door was already open. Assuming I’d simply forgotten to lock it, I stepped inside, expecting to find everything just as it had been earlier in the day. I was wrong.

  I guess I’d been naive about crime up to that point. Yes, I’d lived in Manhattan for nearly twenty years and was hardly unaware that the Big Apple had its share of Bad Apples. But I had never been victimized by crime, never even had my purse snatched, and so I’d been lulled into the conceit that bad things happen to other people.

  And then I walked into my apartment that night and saw that the place had been ransacked, my Pottery Barn furnishings trashed. Gone was my computer. Gone was my TV. Gone was my jewelry, including the gold cufflinks that had belonged to my father and meant more to me than everything I owned. Gone was my sense of security.

  “Looks like an inside job,” said the police officer in charge, a world-weary veteran of the force, judging by his craggy face and air of resignation. “Someone in the building. One of the doormen, maybe.”

  “Should I speak to the super about it?” I asked.

  “You want my advice?” said the cop. “Move. Once these people see your place is vulnerable, they’ll wait for you to replace all the stuff they took, then they’ll break in and clean you out again.”

  “Not if you catch them first.”

  He shrugged.

  “So the chances are, you won’t catch them?”

  “Like I said, if I was you, I’d move.”

  The rest of the week was a blur. There was my wreck of an apartment to tidy up, as well as new locks to be installed. There were calls to my insurance company to ensure that my claim would be processed quickly. There were trips back and forth to the production office so I could borrow one of the computers. There were hours and hours of work on my breakdown, in order to finish it by Friday. And there was packing to be done, as my flight to Florida was leaving LaGuardia at five P.M. the same day.

  I accomplished it all, though, and by seven-thirty on Friday night, the plane had landed at Palm Beach International Airport and my mother was waiting at the gate to greet me.

  “Yoo-hoo! Here I am, Deborah!” she called out when she spotted me entering the terminal. She waved her handbag in the air to catch my attention and inadvertently hit a ticket agent upside the head.

  I waved back, careful not to hit anyone, and before I knew it I was rushing into my mother’s arms like a six-year-old with a boo-boo.

  “Deborah,” she said soothingly as she patted my back. “My little girl.”

  She was the one who was little, I was startled to see. She had shrunk considerably over the past few years, but she seemed especially frail this time, breakable almost. Nevertheless, Lenore Peltz was an attractive woman who looked younger than seventy-five, I thought. She had a trim figure and wavy, silvery hair and an expressiveness that automatically drew people to her. But it was her eyes that were showstoppers. “Tiffany blue,” my sister, the shopper, had labeled their color. They were exquisite and spectacular and the first thing you noticed about my mother when you were introduced to her; the only negative about them was that neither Sharon nor I had inherited them.

  “I’m so glad I came for your birthday, Mom,” I said, still clinging to her. “I really needed a break.”

  “Work getting you down, dear?” she asked. She stroked my cheek in a way that only a mother can stroke a cheek.

  “Among other things,” I said. “I’ll explain it all when we get to the house, okay?”

  She regarded me. “This isn’t about Sharon, is it? Please tell me it isn’t.”

  “No, Mom. It has nothing to do with Sharon.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “Then whatever it is, we’ll just put our heads together and figure out what to do about it, like we’ve done since you were a child.”

  I smiled. My mother, the mediator. My mother, the problem-solver. My mother, the sweetheart. How could such a nice, even-tempered woman have produced such quarrelsome offspring? I wondered. And then I reminded myself that I’d had two parents.

  We headed north from the airport on I–95, passing the exits for Riviera Beach, Palm Beach Gardens, Jupiter, and Hobe Sound before getting off in Stuart. The drive took a little over an hour.
It would have taken less time but my mother had to stop for gas. She always had to stop for gas. Her Oldsmobile Delta 88 was the size of the QE2 and only got ten miles to the gallon. The other problem with the car was that she could barely see over its steering wheel unless she sat on a telephone book. I used to wonder why she didn’t get a newer, more compact car, but then I realized that many of her contemporaries in Florida also drove big old boats and that it must be a generational thing.

  It was close to nine-thirty when we finally crossed the Evans Crary Bridge, over the St. Lucie River and onto the peninsula of Sewall’s Point.

  My mother had updated the house over the years—fresh coat of paint, new carpet, new kitchen appliances—but it was still the rustic 1970s vacation home I remembered, the tropical getaway my father had adored. Set on three acres amid what was almost junglelike foliage, the house was perched on stilts and overlooked the St. Lucie River and, beyond, the estates along Stuart’s St. Lucie Boulevard.

  There were two staircases leading up to the house plus another stairway inside, and as I mounted them I wondered how much longer my mother would be able to. No, being seventy-five didn’t make her an invalid, but I knew there would come a time when the house would be a handful for her, a time when climbing stairs would be an exertion, if not an impossibility.

  After I put my things away in one of the two guest bedrooms, I joined my mother in the kitchen. While I told her my troubles, we feasted on the chicken she’d roasted earlier.

  “Maybe it’s time to move out of the city,” she said when I had come to the end of the sorry saga.

  “That’s what the cop said,” I remarked. “But where would I go?”

  “How about right here? You could bunk in with me. You’ve always loved this house.”

  “I know, but at forty-three I shouldn’t be freeloading off my mother.”

  “Then you’ll find your own place nearby, settle down, meet a nice man.”

  “No offense, Mom, but all the men around here are your age.”